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The Safari Concept: An African Framework for End-of-Life Care
There is a Rwandan saying, "When you are well, you belong to yourself. But when you are sick, you belong to your family."
Understanding the suffering of seriously ill patients is crucial for providing compassionate and practical support to those individuals and their loved ones, which may include immediate family members and whole communities.
Through personal stories, research-based insights, and practical guidance, this book helps readers develop the skills and resources necessary to provide holistic and empathetic support to those facing the end of life.
The Safari Concept is a groundbreaking approach to palliative care that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. By recognizing the importance of family and community in African cultures, the concept invites them to participate with medical caregivers in decision-making and care, as they have for millennia. Using animal archetypes as metaphors, the concept provides a powerful framework for characterizing patterns of a family's suffering and identifying the healthcare team's most effective responses for addressing their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
This approach has been proven to be accessible, compassionate, and effective in supporting the shared journey of the patient, family, and healthcare team. The Safari Concept is a testament to the power of cultural sensitivity and creative thinking in developing truly patient-centered care models.
Understanding the suffering of seriously ill patients is crucial for providing compassionate and practical support to those individuals and their loved ones, which may include immediate family members and whole communities.
Through personal stories, research-based insights, and practical guidance, this book helps readers develop the skills and resources necessary to provide holistic and empathetic support to those facing the end of life.
The Safari Concept is a groundbreaking approach to palliative care that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. By recognizing the importance of family and community in African cultures, the concept invites them to participate with medical caregivers in decision-making and care, as they have for millennia. Using animal archetypes as metaphors, the concept provides a powerful framework for characterizing patterns of a family's suffering and identifying the healthcare team's most effective responses for addressing their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
This approach has been proven to be accessible, compassionate, and effective in supporting the shared journey of the patient, family, and healthcare team. The Safari Concept is a testament to the power of cultural sensitivity and creative thinking in developing truly patient-centered care models.
161 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 6, 2023
5 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 30, 2023
I had the privilege of editing this book ahead of its presentation to a medical conference. Dr. Ntizimira’s life work has been the study of end-of-life care, specifically how different families approach treatments, support, and palliative care. His observations and understandings of cultural sensitivities are stunning, and he got me to rethink how we treat people at the end of their lives, how we treat the people who care about them, and how I might proceed when my time comes. It’s a beautiful book.
August 27, 2024
This is not a niche book. Okay, it is niche in that it’s meant for palliative care professionals. But if the thought that it’s “African” or specific to Rwanda has you assuming that it’s not relevant to your setting, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Absorbing writing, practical, deeply insightful: an excellent resource and exciting discovery. It’s a short book about strategic and compassionate communication with the patient’s close community of care. The kind of thing that enlarges your imagination for application in your own context. A friend recommended it to me after hearing the author speak at a conference.
A Stanford professor reviewed it saying, “Palliative medicine audiences are riveted… The world is waiting for this book.”
A distinctive feature of the Safari Concept is to intentionally integrate the larger family (including extended family, neighbors, friends etc.) into planning for a patient’s end-of-life care, from the start. Dr. Ntizimira details the practical methodology he has developed to achieve this in a Rwandan context, which includes a tool used to make sense of the family’s response: animal archetypes.
He explains that he found it helpful to use metaphors to interpret the patterns of suffering that families express in response to their loved one’s illness. The animal archetypes are not meant to be communicated with families, but instead are tools used by the medical staff to identify the most helpful way to respond to a family’s distress.
—
A brief outline:
Forward: The Harvard professor who directed the author’s palliative care training there describes his approach. She explains that “instead of transferring Western approaches directly to Rwanda he has reinterpreted, reframed, and deepened them.” As Dr. Ntizimira himself says, “Simply transplanting a model of care from one part of the world to another misses the opportunity for best practice, and it is unlikely to be successful or sustainable” (p. 23).
Introduction: A gripping origin story for the Safari Concept (which is repeated with more detail in chapter 1)
Ch. 1: A biographical sketch that sets out both the themes of the author’s personal and professional approach to palliative care and key aspects of the culture and setting where this methodology was developed.
Ch. 2: Describes the Safari Concept, both the core philosophy and the practice (p. 32-39). It’s striking, strategic on multiple levels at once and very flexible. He also describes his learning process in developing it, including key lessons from patients and families.
Each of the remaining chapters details one of 12 patterns of family suffering/coping, framed in terms of an animal archetype. They feature effective and moving storytelling, with concise analysis. Each presents a complex case study to model how this dynamic plays out, identifies key features and underlying needs, and lists specific guidance for handling it. These are rich chapters, case studies that illustrate a pattern but also do a lot of heavy lifting, providing nuts-and-bolts context for how the Safari Concept method looks when it is applied—and revealing deeper elements of Ntizimira’s ethic of work.
I found it brilliant.
Absorbing writing, practical, deeply insightful: an excellent resource and exciting discovery. It’s a short book about strategic and compassionate communication with the patient’s close community of care. The kind of thing that enlarges your imagination for application in your own context. A friend recommended it to me after hearing the author speak at a conference.
A Stanford professor reviewed it saying, “Palliative medicine audiences are riveted… The world is waiting for this book.”
A distinctive feature of the Safari Concept is to intentionally integrate the larger family (including extended family, neighbors, friends etc.) into planning for a patient’s end-of-life care, from the start. Dr. Ntizimira details the practical methodology he has developed to achieve this in a Rwandan context, which includes a tool used to make sense of the family’s response: animal archetypes.
He explains that he found it helpful to use metaphors to interpret the patterns of suffering that families express in response to their loved one’s illness. The animal archetypes are not meant to be communicated with families, but instead are tools used by the medical staff to identify the most helpful way to respond to a family’s distress.
—
A brief outline:
Forward: The Harvard professor who directed the author’s palliative care training there describes his approach. She explains that “instead of transferring Western approaches directly to Rwanda he has reinterpreted, reframed, and deepened them.” As Dr. Ntizimira himself says, “Simply transplanting a model of care from one part of the world to another misses the opportunity for best practice, and it is unlikely to be successful or sustainable” (p. 23).
Introduction: A gripping origin story for the Safari Concept (which is repeated with more detail in chapter 1)
Ch. 1: A biographical sketch that sets out both the themes of the author’s personal and professional approach to palliative care and key aspects of the culture and setting where this methodology was developed.
Ch. 2: Describes the Safari Concept, both the core philosophy and the practice (p. 32-39). It’s striking, strategic on multiple levels at once and very flexible. He also describes his learning process in developing it, including key lessons from patients and families.
Each of the remaining chapters details one of 12 patterns of family suffering/coping, framed in terms of an animal archetype. They feature effective and moving storytelling, with concise analysis. Each presents a complex case study to model how this dynamic plays out, identifies key features and underlying needs, and lists specific guidance for handling it. These are rich chapters, case studies that illustrate a pattern but also do a lot of heavy lifting, providing nuts-and-bolts context for how the Safari Concept method looks when it is applied—and revealing deeper elements of Ntizimira’s ethic of work.
I found it brilliant.
April 30, 2025
I found this book to be really interesting and very practical in dealing with end of life matters with African families. Yes, this book speaks specifically to a Rwandan setting, but a lot of this is still very applicable more broadly.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews