News

World Hospice and Palliative Care Day (WHPCD) 2024

  • by Maria Lopez
  • October 12, 2024

World Hospice and Palliative Care Day (WHPCD) is a unified day of action to celebrate and support hospice and palliative care around the world every second Saturday in October. This year’s theme is, “Ten Years Since the Resolution: How Are We Doing?.”

The year 2024 marks 10 years since the World Health Assembly (WHO’s Governing Body) passed the only stand-alone resolution on palliative care, calling for all countries to “strengthen palliative care as a component of comprehensive care throughout the life course.”

While we are lucky here in Australia to have palliative care embedded into our health systems, WHPCD gives us time to reflect that not every country in the world has it so lucky. Palliative care is still not accessible to most people in need, especially in low and middle-income countries.

Palliative Care is a major unmet need across the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) less than 15% of the nearly 60 million adults and children in need of palliative care services receive it. Palliative care is an ethical responsibility of health systems, and it is the ethical duty of healthcare professionals to alleviate pain and suffering.

18 million people die every year with pain and suffering, due to lack of access to palliative care and pain relief. Palliative care development should follow the public health model developed by the WHO that emphasises policy, education, medication availability, community empowerment, research, and implementation however there are many barriers to achieving each of these components.

Read more about palliative care on the global stage on the World Hospice and Palliative Care Alliance’s website. Please click here.

#WHPCDay24 #10YearsOn #PalliativeCare

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