Challenge

What IAPC could not manage in 2 decades had to be done in a couple of years - increase access to palliative care in India. This hadn't happened largely due to 2 big hurdles - a deep-rooted cultural taboo that made the nation have limited or no conversations around death, which in turn, made it impossible for doctors to even discuss it with terminally ill patients and their families and recommend palliative care. In fact, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2015 India's end-of-life care ranked last among 40 countries, giving a score of 2/5 in public awareness, attributing it partly to reluctance to openly discuss death5. IAPC had to find a way to break this taboo and get the nation talking about death and also increase access to palliative care.

Solution

To break the centuries-old cultural taboo, it was essential to get the nation to question the rationale of the taboo. It was critical to replace the irrational negativity associated with talking about death in India - with positivity.

There was a powerful insight that we unearthed when we met the terminally ill and their families through the IAPC network - Palliative care helps people accept death, even laugh about it.

This contagious positivity of the terminally ill could be used to get Indians to question their irrational negativity on talking about death: If these ordinary folks staring death in the face can laugh about it, then why can't I at least talk about it?

Thus, breaking the taboo on death, starting conversations on death and demonstrating the impact of palliative care – all in one go.

This led to the idea of the Last Laugh – A series of stand-up comedy shows performed by the terminally ill to break the taboo. Palliative care counsellors and India’s best comedians joined hands to screen, train and support these patients over several months. The shows with their recordings and coverage became our campaign, using the terminally ill palliative care patients and their contagious positivity to break the ingrained cultural taboo of a nation.

And at each step, collaboration helped achieve scale without investments: Market research happened through IAPC's partner hospices. The patients were screened by palliative care counsellors and trained by India's leading stand-up comics. The event was held at The Cuckoo Club, a well-known stand-up comedy venue at no cost. And media amplification happened through content partnerships with India's leading radio network (Radio Mirchi) and TV news network (NDTV).

Result

The campaign trended on YouTube and Twitter, got free media worth three hundred thousand USD. Conversations around the campaign, death and palliative care grew with palliative care inquiries up 400%, attendance of workshops for doctors went up by 125% and finally campaign garnering over 3 million views in just less than a month. All of these helped not only to break a deep-seated cultural taboo of a nation but worked towards increasing access to palliative care from 1% to 5% in just 2 years.