Published on: October 11, 2021

Worldwide only about 12% of palliative care need is being met for patients and families living with life-threatening disease.

Just ahead of this year’s World Hospice and Palliative Care day, World Health Organization (WHO) released a new technical report titled: Assessing the development of palliative care worldwide: a set of actionable indicators

This is a long-awaited set of 18 palliative care indicators that can be used at the national level to measure development of palliative care.

Palliative Care providers worldwide are encouraged to promote these indicators to governments, and to report them to WHO to improve monitoring of palliative care and its inclusion in Universal Health Coverage.

The development of this report was done jointly with the research team of ATLANTES palliative care observatory at the University of Navarra, Spain. Experts were gathered from all WHO regions to generate consensus around a globally applicable and robust set of palliative care indicators to be used by Member States to assess and monitor the provision of palliative care services in countries worldwide. 

Pallium India’s Chairman, Dr. M. R. Rajagopal, and Head – Policy & Strategic Partnerships, Smriti Rana, were part of this group of experts representing LMICs. 

Accompanying this report is a technical brief on Quality health Services and Palliative Care: practical approaches and resources to support policy, strategy and practice. This resource is relevant to all those working in palliative care from policy makers to the facility level and provides tangible steps that can be adapted and adopted by countries to expand access to quality palliative care for those who need it.

These publications are part of the global commitment made in 2014, with the adoption by the World Health Assembly  resolution on strengthening of palliative care, the aim to complement a series of operational guides published over the past years to facilitate the integration of palliative care services across disease groups. 

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