Call for review of global access to palliative care

Tuesday December 17th, 2019

Only 14% of people globally have access to palliative care services, while more than half the world’s population has poor or non-existent access, a study reveals today (17 December 2019).

Professor David Clark, of the University of Glasgow, led research that found that only 30 countries from 198 in the world have sophisticated levels of palliative care provision that are fully integrated into the health and social care system.

He and collaborators have called for a major review of global policies to promote palliative care.

Professor Clark said the research team had significantly improved the methods for conducting the study, compared to its two previous versions, incorporating appropriate indicators of palliative care development drawn from the recent literature and using a more transparent, statistically justified algorithm for the analysis.

“This is the most robust analysis to date of the level of palliative care development in almost all countries of the world,” he said.

“We categorise each country into one of six levels of development, show how many countries are now at each level, and also map these onto the proportions of the global population in each category - revealing that half the global population has little access to specialised palliative care.”

Study author Professor Carlos Centeno, of the University of Navarra in Spain, said: “Our research shows how much there is still is to do in this field. It is time to demand from policy-makers greater efforts to improve access to palliative care education and training for professionals and to incorporate palliative care into national health systems.”

The World Health Assembly has endorsed the need for all countries to develop national strategies for palliative care provision. The research team’s analysis of 198 countries in 2017 casts some doubt, however, on the effectiveness of recent global strategies.

Dr Stephen Connor, chief executive of the Worldwide Hospice and Palliative Care Alliance and study collaborator, said the 2014 World Health Assembly resolution called for the strengthening of palliative care in all countries, but this was not being realised, leading to millions of patients and families are suffering unnecessarily.

Mapping levels of palliative care development in 198 countries: the situation. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in press

https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S0885-3924(19)30664-5/fulltext

Tags: Pain Relief | UK News | World Health

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