Great Achievement by Palliative Care Activists
Finally, the day has come. The NCD Alliance has been working very hard to get palliative care on the United Nation’s agenda on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs). Pallium India is proud to have collaborated in the movement.
Palliative care has been recognised to be one of the important components of the program and the following “indicator” has been approved.
Access to palliative care assessed by morphine-equivalent consumption of strong opioid analgesics (excluding methadone) per death from cancer. [pdf]
There are questions asked about how appropriate the indicator is – IAHPC, for example, has arrived at a consensus that per capita opioid consumption is a much better indicator than “per death from cancer” – but, for the moment, let us rejoice that ‘suffering” is getting some attention, rather than “diseases”.
The NCD Alliance was founded by four international NGO federations representing the four main NCDs:
- cardiovascular disease
- diabetes
- cancer
- chronic respiratory disease
Together with other major international NGO partners, the NCD Alliance unites a network of over 2,000 civil society organizations in more than 170 countries. The mission of the NCD Alliance is to combat the NCD epidemic by putting health at the centre of all policies.
We thank the NCD Alliance for the advocacy and particularly Claire Morris and team for all the hard work on behalf of palliative care.
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