To say Anne Merriman has led a remarkable life is an understatement. Her list of achievements is astonishing....CONTINUE READING
Dr Anne trained as a doctor, then spent two decades as a nun, before switching her focus to palliative care – caring for the dying and their families.
In 1993, she set up a hospice in Uganda, with a vision to give people across the entire continent of Africa a dignified death.
Now, at 89 years of age, she remains a powerful advocate for giving people the best death possible through palliative care. Speaking to the ECHO from her home in Uganda, she said: “We get terribly agitated when we’re dying, and it’s so important to relieve the pain then.”
“But caring for the dying is the lowest priority in health, because doctors are trying to cure, not to care.” Although Dr Anne has spent most of her career caring for the sick and dying in Africa and Asia, it all began on Merseyside.
She was born in Liverpool in 1935, the daughter of Irish immigrants, and second youngest of four children. The family lived on Queen’s Drive in Walton and stayed in the city for most of the war, with Anne’s father working as an Air Raid Warden.
Despite living through the war years, she has happy memories of her childhood, and of Liverpool. She has lived in Uganda for decades, but still misses the city.
She told the ECHO: “The people in Liverpool are so friendly – I still miss Liverpool’s friendliness.” At a young age, her mind was set on going to Africa. Anne recalls how, at the age of four, she saw photographs of Africans in a magazine and told her mother: “I’m going to Africa to care for the poorly children.”
Tragedy struck the family when she was 12. Her beloved brother, Bernard, who had recently gained top marks in the city’s scholarship exam, died of a brain tumour, aged just 11.
Dr Anne said: “It was the biggest sadness in my life as a child. We were very close – we had a secret society, just the two of us.”
“He came home with a very bad headache, and it turned out he had a tumour on the base of his brain.” Bernard died on Easter Sunday, April 28, 1946, in Fazakerley Hospital, the day after their mother’s birthday.
So great was her sorrow at her son’s death, Anne’s mother never celebrated her birthday again. Bernard’s experience – and the family’s grief – left a deep impression on the young Anne.
Anne Merriman at the Sacred Heart Hospital, Obudu, Nigeria, after the Biafran War, 1970. She said: “There was no palliative care for him, and nothing to help us with bereavement afterwards. We wore a diamond on our sleeves to show we’d been bereaved, but nobody took any notice of it.”
“I remember feeling so sad on a bus full of people and thinking: they don’t know what we’ve just been through.”
After leaving Broughton Hall School in West Derby, Anne trained as a doctor in Dublin and became a nun, joining the Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM).
With the MMM, she carried out missionary work in Africa and Asia, specialising in child health and tropical medicine. She left the order after two decades, after realising “God had other things I could do better.”
In 1979, she returned to Liverpool for nearly a decade. She cared for her sick mother, and worked in geriatric medicine at Whiston Hospital and St Helen’s Hospital. This was a crucial moment in her life.
Dr Anne said: “That’s where I first saw long term patients in the wards, and I didn’t like the way they were dying.” I hadn’t been involved with palliative care before then, but I started reading all the books on the subject.
Later, she took up a variety of academic positions, and introduced palliative care to Singapore, where she developed a pioneering oral liquid morphine, which she used to make up “at the kitchen sink”.
She said: “The people there had nothing for pain relief once they were sent home from hospital. They were screaming in pain in their flats there. So we designed a formula for oral morphine which is easier to make than a cup of coffee.”
She added: “Once you use this formula, you realise: we’ve been in the dark for centuries over pain.”
According to Anne, oral morphine is not addictive, though she still has to persuade people it is safe to use. In 1993, after convincing the country’s government that the risk of addiction was low, she was able to introduce the oral morphine to Uganda.
That year, at the height of the country’s AIDs epidemic, she founded the Hospice Africa Uganda. She said: “They’d never heard of palliative care in Uganda when I came here 30 years ago. When we came in it was the only third country in Africa to have it, and it became a model for the rest of Africa.”
Dr Anne Merriman set up the charity Hospice Africa in Uganda in 1993. Anne helped set up the Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care, where thousands of doctors and nurses from across Africa have been trained. She also founded a charity, Hospice Africa UK, based in Ormskirk, which has charity shops in Old Swan, Ainsdale and Stoneycroft.
In 2014, Dr Anne was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in palliative care. At the time of the nomination, she dedicated it to all who had helped her care for the suffering, from international organisations to “Pete and all in the Old Swan shop and all in the Ainsdale shop.”
She has stepped back from the day to day running of the Ugandan hospice now, and has endured health problems of her own in recent years, suffering five heart attacks and, more recently, a broken leg.
Despite this, she still has a busy schedule of work to deal with. On the day the ECHO called, Dr Anne was preparing to participate in a conference with the Royal College of Edinburgh on geriatric medicine.
Asked what advice she had for young people starting out in life, she said this: “We’ve all been very lucky to be born in Britain. You should think to yourself: how can I help? What can I do for the rest of the world?”
This inspirational woman from Walton has certainly set the bar high for the next generation…CONTINUE READING>>
