Published on: August 11, 2014

India is not an affluent country. Can we afford to talk about quality of care? Or should we just give whatever we can to as many as we can? This is a dilemma that palliative care activists face. Clearly, there is an injustice in giving first class care to a few and depriving the masses of care. On the other hand, if it is spread too thin, no one may benefit.

Or worse, there is the real danger that without attention to quality, care can indeed be harmful, like an untrained person causing cross infection between our immune-suppressed patients or someone without counselling skills attempting counselling and emotionally destroying a vulnerable person.

Pallium India strongly believes that we need to have a balance between coverage and quality. We recommend that we need to decide on some minimum standards of care. We vow that we shall refuse to go below that standard and then attempt to reach as many as we can.

With this aim in view, Pallium India got 13 experts from various parts of the country together to work on creation of a minimum standards document. They created a standards tool which was used for evaluation by a large number of palliative care organizations in the country. The results, published in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care, are now available for your perusal.