78th WHA Constituency Statements
Health emergencies, pandemics, conflicts, and natural disasters, disproportionately affect older persons, persons with disabilities, children, and those with life-limiting conditions. Although humanitarian interventions oft prioritize lifesaving over palliative care, prepared health systems should be able to do both. Concerted, system wide planning prevents fatal diagnostic delays and treatment abandonment of patients with life limiting illnesses.
The COVID Pandemic exposed palliative care and essential medicine deficits in health systems of all resource levels. Let’s learn its lethal lessons and ensure that inadequately trained health workforces and stockouts of essential medicines like morphine and midazolam are a thing of the past. Primary palliative care sustains health system resilience during pandemics by addressing physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychosocial needs of both patients and health workers when curative options are limited.
We welcome the explicit inclusion of palliative care of the UHC definition section of the Pandemic Agreement and support the primary care foundation that also includes rehabilitation. Our constituents commit to supporting the advocacy needed to implement the Agreement’s provisions in national legal frameworks.
We urge member states
● to embed palliative care for persons of all ages and abilities in primary care by providing basic training to health workforces BEFORE emergencies strike
● to include palliative care in core relief packages when planning for emergencies and to audit stockpiles of essential medicines, including generics such as morphine and midazolam, to protect the health of one billion more people.