Lancet Commission on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief

Technical Note and Data Appendix for Report

The lack of global access to pain relief and palliative care throughout the life cycle constitutes a global crisis and action to close this divide between rich and poor is a moral, health and ethical imperative.

Global and national health systems solutions exist that can close this divide; lack of financial resources is not the limiting factor. Yet, efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage – a now widely accepted goal of health systems – have largely ignored the need for pain relief and palliative care.

The issue has seldom if at all been considered through a health system lens applying a diagonal approach that considers chronicity of illness and works across diseases. By coupling evidence-based advocacy with advocacy-inspired evidence we can identify and implement policies and programs that would end the tragedy of health and travesty of justice of permitting poor patients to suffer unnecessary pain, while simultaneously helping all people to avoid unnecessary suffering during and at end of life.