Minimum palliative care standards for health care?
“If you have been in palliative care long enough in India, the sight of a person with an ugly scar around the neck would not be unfamiliar to you. Hanging is the preferred mode of attempted suicide in our country, and many people are driven to it by unrelieved pain, the extent of which, in many disease states, can be beyond an ordinary human being’s power of imagination. The National Crime Records Bureau showed that 26,426 people in the country, suffering from various ailments, chose to end their lives in 2013.”
Please see the special editorial in the July-September 2016 issue of the Indian Journal of Palliative Care by Dr M. R. Rajagopal, Chairman of Pallium India. To reduce the sad burden of pain and suffering in the country, he argues, we should be demanding that healthcare system at all levels must include basic palliative care satisfying some minimum essential standards.
Read the open access article titled “We Have a Responsibility” published in the Indian Journal of Palliative Care.