MENTORING for SUCCESS: A Manual for Palliative Care Professionals, Organisations and Associations.
Download a copy of the manual here. 
The African Palliative Care Association (APCA) aims to support the scaling-up of palliative care provision across Africa for those with progressive, life-limiting illness through a culturally appropriate public health approach that strives to balance coverage with quality.
Currently in many African countries, palliative care services are either non-existent, misnamed as they only provide supportive rather than holistic care, or are restricted to the use of the fortunate minority. APCA seeks to address these deficiencies in part through its mentorship programme, in which ongoing technical support is provided to ensure programmatic initiatives are sustainable. This highly welcome manual is a key component of that mentorship programme.
The manual originates from, and is an expansion of, the mentorship manual developed by the Hospice Palliative Care Association of South Africa, also funded by the Open Society Institute (OSI). That project entailed using well-established hospices, with a strong integrated community-based home care programme, providing structured guidance and support to developing hospices in five regions of the country. Further funding from OSI enabled the programme's expansion into the fields of education and accreditation.
This manual advances that mentorship agenda across the African continent. Directed towards the mentorship of professionals, organisations and associations involved in the field of palliative care, it focuses on the areas of: organizational development; standards of care; advocacy and policy influencing; education and training; fund raising and donor relations; and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The need for the latter in an era of increasingly demanding international donor expectations regarding financial integrity, budgetary transparency and the proven impact value of funded work programmes, as well as the complexity of the concepts entailed, is reflected in the disproportionate length of the M&E chapter.
For many emerging organisations, the very notion of being measured and assessed is, in itself, threatening. In our experience, one of the most valuable types of mentorship is helping people and organisations to accept and cope with the change that is implicit in M&E. We therefore strongly advocate linking the implementation of care standards and any audit activities to M&E and would suggest that this is an essential ingredient in terms of sustaining the quality improvement cycle that APCA so rightly endorses.
Finally, it is our hope that this manual will be of great use and benefit, and be a stepping stone towards the realisation of APCA's mission of scaling up palliative care in Africa by balancing quality with coverage.
Kath Defilippi and Sue Cameron