No one left behind! Lack of attention to hospice palliative care

The theme is “The last climb: ending AIDS, leaving no one behind.   Long gone are the three by five challenges (three million on treatments by 2005).  Now we are talking of 20 million on treatment by 2020.

There are participants from all around the globe.  People living with HIV/AIDS, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and industry come together to advance the global response to HIV. The program includes prevention, treatment, care and support but is almost silent on the fact that millions around the world will need hospice palliative care in the next decade.   The need to provide end of life care as well as good pain and symptom management is immense.  A handful of poster presentations and a few mentions are all the profile that end of life care is receiving.

Are those of us working in hospice palliative care part of the problem?  Did we not work hard enough to influence the conference agenda?  The children’s agenda for this conference contained almost nothing on hospice palliative care.

At last year’s Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) conference in Montreal, Canada hospice palliative care received its own stream.  There were some outstanding speakers from the field of hospice palliative care.  Interestingly, most participants were from the hospice palliative care field and the challenge remains how does the hospice palliative care field influence those in the broader allied health care fields? 

I challenge us to do better at the 21^st International AIDS Conference planned for July 2016 in Durban, South Africa.  Let’s be able to say “No one left behind – including those who are needing hospice palliative care”