Walking with the Weary- caring for people at the end of life’s journey
Rajagopal lived a “decades-long palliative care journey, walking with people suffering from life limiting illnesses, and lessons learned on how to befriend life until the very end, with compassionate care on one’s side.”
Dr Rajagopal is the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Policy and Training on Access to Pain Relief at Trivandrum Institute of Palliative Sciences (TIPS) and the founder-chairman of “Pallium India”, a charitable trust. His initiative led to the development of a Government policy on Palliative Care in the state of Kerala in 2008, its revision in 2019 and to a National Palliative Care Strategy (National Program for Palliative Care) for India in 2012.
He received the award for excellence in pain management at Montreal, Canada from the International Association for Study of Pain (IASP) in 2009 and Alison Des Forges award for ‘extraordinary activism’ at Los Angeles from Human Rights Watch in 2014. In 2017, he was named one of the 30 global visionaries in palliative care by American Academy for Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
In 2017, a documentary film titled “Hippocratic: 18 experiments in gently shaking the world” based on Dr. Rajagopal’s contributions to palliative care was released by Moonshine Agency, Australia (http://hippocraticfilm.com/).
In 2018, the Government of India conferred on him “Padmashree”, it’s third highest civilian award.
In 2022, he published his memoirs, ‘Walk with the Weary’ which attracted reviews around the world, including British Medical Journal and the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Dr Eric Krakauer, associate professor of internal medicine at Harvard wrote, “It is the best writing on palliative care that I have read and one of the best in medicine”. Dr Soumya Swaminathan, former chief scientist at WHO wrote that the book must be in undergraduate medical and nursing curriculum.
