Dr Anne Merriman
A Liverpool physician who has dedicated her career to caring for the dying in Africa has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Edge Hill University.
Dr Anne Merriman is world-renowned for her pioneering work and influential research into palliative care in developing countries in Africa, enhancing the treatment of the dying and working tirelessly to make morphine available to those in need.
Dr Merriman is responsible for the ‘Merriman Model’ – a palliative care programme devised during her work in the Nairobi Hospice in Kenya. It was here that she witnessed terrible suffering of terminally-ill cancer patients without access to proper oncology treatment or pain relief. Using Uganda as a pilot, she rolled out the model to health services in several other African countries, ultimately creating the affordable and accessible cancer treatment that was made available on the continent during the 1990s.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Dr Merriman graduated from National University of Ireland, UCD in 1963. She went straight to Nigeria where she worked in hospitals, specialising in surgery, obstetrics, paediatrics and medicine between 1964 and 1973. She returned to Liverpool and trained as a Consultant Physician in Geriatric Medicine. In 1976, she became the Head of Geriatric Medicine at Whiston Hospital, where she saw the great need for a palliative care model based on the work of Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern Hospice movement.
Her interest in palliative medicine was nurtured during a seven-year stint in the Far East, where she was an associate professor at a hospital in Penang, Malaysia and went on to found the Hospice Care Movement in Singapore, where her work, once again, shaped the development of palliative care in the region.
Dr Anne is now the Director of Policy and International Programmes for Hospice Africa, a charity that promotes affordable service, education, research and the ethos of love and care for patients and families at the end of their life. She has collaborated with the University’s Professor Barbara Jack on several research programmes around the care of the dying and now has hospice programmes running in Malawi, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.
Speaking on receiving the honorary award, Dr Anne Merriman said: “It is a great privilege to be honoured with a doctorate from Edge Hill University, particularly so close to Liverpool where I was born. It has been a fantastic experience collaborating with Professor Barbara Jack, who has enhanced Hospice Africa’s work with patients and families through her research findings. Such collaboration is key to spreading the message that care is possible even in some of the economically-challenged countries in the world.”