Research Hub on Global Access to Palliative Care and Pain Relief
Overview
The Hub supports global efforts to expand access to palliative care and essential pain relief by leading international research that generates standardized metrics, including estimates of serious health-related suffering (SHS) and Distributed Opioids in Morphine Equivalent (DOME), to inform health-system reform, workforce planning, and service delivery at scale.
Established in 2021, the hub includes numerous researchers from countries of varying income levels, including Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and China. We are actively working on global research and training activities that can effectively generate updated estimates of serious health-related suffering (SHS) and to support regional and country-level research efforts. Several graduate students and early-career researchers have been brought into the Hub and been fully trained in the calculation of SHS.
Background
The concept of Serious Health-related Suffering (SHS) was introduced in the report of the Lancet Commission on Pain Relief and Palliative Care (Knaul, et al., 2017). Suffering is health-related when it is associated with illness or injury of any kind.