Palliative care and policy are deeply intertwined aspects of healthcare delivery, aiming to improve the quality of life for patients facing serious illnesses. Here’s an overview of their relationship:
- Definition and Goals:
- Palliative Care: Focuses on improving the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering.
- Policy: Refers to the laws, regulations, guidelines, and initiatives enacted by governments, healthcare organisations, and other entities to address various aspects of healthcare delivery.
- Role of Policy in Palliative Care:
- Regulation and Standards: Policies set standards for the delivery of palliative care, ensuring that it meets certain quality benchmarks.
- Funding and Reimbursement: Policies dictate how palliative care services are funded and reimbursed, affecting accessibility and affordability for patients.
- Education and Training: Policies may mandate training for healthcare professionals in palliative care practices, ensuring competence and quality of care.
- Integration into Healthcare Systems: Policies promote the integration of palliative care into mainstream healthcare systems, ensuring it is available across different settings (hospitals, nursing homes, home care, etc.).
- Challenges and Issues:
- Access: Disparities in access to palliative care can arise due to policy differences across regions or countries.
- Funding: Inadequate funding can limit the availability and scope of palliative care services.
- Awareness and Education: Policies may need to address gaps in public and healthcare provider awareness about palliative care.
- Legal and Ethical Considerations: Policies often deal with complex ethical issues surrounding end-of-life care, including decision-making and advance directives.
- Global Perspectives:
- Variability: Policies on palliative care vary significantly between countries, influenced by cultural, economic, and political factors.
- International Standards: Organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) provide guidelines and recommendations to standardise and improve palliative care globally.
- Future Directions:
- Advocacy: Continued advocacy is needed to ensure that policies reflect the evolving needs of patients and families facing serious illness.
- Research: Policies should support research into improving palliative care practices and outcomes.
- Innovation: Encouraging innovation in palliative care delivery through policy can lead to better patient outcomes and experiences.
In conclusion, palliative care and policy are crucial components of healthcare systems worldwide, working together to ensure that patients receive compassionate, high-quality care that addresses their physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs during serious illness and at the end of life.
Thank you for this. But to get a good quality service we need to have a good quality team. Hospicce Africa was commenced with a. vision of “palliative care for all in Africa”. It has moved very slowly. But the essence of our caring services comes from our Ethos. This has 3 recommendations only:
1. The patient and family are the centre of all we do (this means that whatever department or skills you have all your decisions reflect that you have considered how your decision will affect the patient and family from the richest to the poorest).
2. That we care for each other in our teams. ie some specialists such as ED, Doctor, Accountants will demand higher salaries because of their well established higher salary scales. But this does not mean they are any better than anyone else caring for the patients and family. This approach of ‘highest salaries are senior’ is part of an inherited bureaucracy from the occupying European countries that occupied African countries for so many years. It does not work in PC. We must be ready to care and support each other particularly those
at our coal face: our Nurses. They are often on lower salaries because of the patronising approach to them by senior medicals.
3. That we work together and share with other organisation’s doing similar work, We maybe all family with the same caring approach. But this is the hardest to keep to, when we are all seeking funds from the same donor and we are inclined to show “how much my organisation is better than the next.”