Global health is lacking the investments, interventions, and indicators necessary to ensure universal access to adequate care for the palliation serious health-related suffering.

This Lancet report aims to fix these limitations by:
(1) measuring the problem of serious health-related suffering associated with a need for palliative care and pain relief; (2) identifying and costing an essential package of health services to ease this problem; (3) measuring the unmet need for immediate-release oral and injectable morphine; and (4) outlining health-systems strategies to expand access to palliative care.

Results of this study were as follows:
1. Alleviation of the burden of pain, suffering, and severe distress associated with life-threatening or life-limiting health conditions and with end of life is global health and equity imperative. Most high-income countries applied effective interventions, however people living in low-income and middle-income countries have little or no access to pain relief or palliative care.
2. An affordable, essential package of palliative care and pain relief interventions can be made universally accessible to remedy the negated to access to adequate care.
3. Low-income and middle-income countries have immense but unrealized opportunities to improve the welfare of poor people at low cost. Financing and integrating the essential package in health systems and using cost-effective models that can offers a solution.
4. International collective action is necessary to ensure that all people, including the poor, have access to palliative care and pain relief.
5. Effective policies making requires evidence and priority-setting tools to measure the need for palliative care, implement programs, and monitor their progress to alleviate the burden of serious health related suffering.

See reference for more information.

Adapted from Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief— an imperative of universal health coverage: the Lancet Commission report. Internet. Accessed on August 30, 2023. Available at https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2817%2932513-8