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The Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network

The Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network (APHN) is a network of individuals and organisations involved in the development and provision of palliative care services in the Asia Pacific region. The brainchild of a Japanese physician, Dr Shigeaki Hinohara, and initially supported by funds from the Nippon Foundation through its Life Planning Centre, the organisation was registered in Singapore in March 2001 after 6 years of gestation. A secretariat was set up at the National Cancer Centre Singapore within its Department of Palliative Medicine with Dr Rosalie Shaw, a veteran and pioneer of palliative medicine from Australia and Singapore, as Executive Director. The mission of the APHN is to provide support for individuals working in palliative care in the region where many services are at a developmental stage, and to encourage networking among the many organisations providing hospice palliative care (Table 1). It is a registered charity, and funding comes from charitable foundations of the region, from the National Cancer Centre Singapore and from educational activities. The Network presently has 781 members of which 656 are individuals and 125 are organisational members from 24 countries (1). Regional members belong to 14 sectors which are geographical regions made up of countries, or parts of countries (Table 2). The sectors ensure that representation on the Management Council is spread across the region, with a maximum of 2 seats for each sector. Only palliative care organisational members are eligible to vote and to appoint representatives onto the Council. This is designed to encourage co-operation among organisational members within each sector, which have to agree on the candidates to represent their sector. Both individual and organisational members ascribe to a common set of values. These are spelt out in the constitution and have to be endorsed by the applicant for membership (Table 3). The chief activities of the APHN are education and training, and networking at the individual and organisational levels. The biennial Asia Pacific Hospice Conferences (APHCs) are part of the APHN activities. These have been held in Singapore in 1989 and 1996, in Hong Kong in 1999, Taipei in 2001, and Osaka in 2003. The next APHC is planned for Seoul in March 2005 (2),