My friend Anne Merriman, who has died aged 90, was a pioneering doctor and founder of the Hospice Africa charity, which aims to offer “palliative care for all those in need” across the continent.
While working in Singapore in the 1980s, Anne devised an affordable morphine-based painkiller, and took it to Africa in the 90s. In 1993 in Kampala, Uganda, she founded Hospice Africa, establishing a hospice model that could be adapted for other countries. By 2023, Hospice Africa had cared for more than 37,000 patients in Uganda, and today it helps provide home-based palliative care in more than 35 countries across Africa.
Born in Liverpool, Anne was the third of four children of Josie (nee Dunne), a typist, and Thomas Merriman, a primary school headteacher. Aged four, Anne had opened a magazine about missionaries in Africa and told her mother she was “going to help these children”. That conviction deepened when, at 14, she watched The Visitation, a film about medical nuns in Africa.
After her secondary education at Broughton Hall Convent grammar school, Anne crossed the Irish Sea in 1954 to join the Medical Missionaries of Mary. As a young sister she studied medicine at University College Dublin, and on gaining her degree in 1963, she departed for Nigeria for the first of two postings there.
In 1973 Anne left the order and returned to Liverpool to work as a consultant and senior lecturer in geriatric medicine at the David Lewis Northern hospital for four years. The hospital closed in 1978, and Anne continued to develop her compassion-driven approach to palliative care while revamping the geriatric medicine units at hospitals in Whiston and St Helens.
Anne’s mother was good friends with my grandmother, and our families had in common a favourite holiday cottage in the Lake District. Despite her love of that area, and her ties to Liverpool, after Josie’s death in 1981 Anne moved abroad again, first to Malaysia in 1983, to take up an associate professor role in the department of public health at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, then to the National University of Singapore the following year as a senior teaching fellow.
From her flat she started the volunteer-led Hospice Care Group, which became the country’s Hospice Care Association. With help from the university hospital, she developed a groundbreaking formula of affordable pure oral morphine – comprising morphine powder, water and a preservative.
On becoming medical director of the newly opened Nairobi hospice in 1990, Anne took that formula to Kenya. It was Kampala, though, that became home for the last chapter of her life, and where she decided to set up Hospice Africa. There, Anne also helped to establish the African Palliative Care Association (2003) and the Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care in Africa (2009).
Anne was made MBE in 2003, and was posthumously conferred with Uganda’s National Independence Diamond Jubilee medal.
She is survived by two nieces, Paula and Jane.
