What is it?

Palliative care aims to improve quality of life and alleviate suffering for those with progressive life-threatening conditions such as AIDS, cancer or advanced heart failure.

This is achieved by:

Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care

"Adding life to days, not days to life"

Ruth Wooldridge, Nairobi Hospice

The need

"There is little awareness of, and expertise in, palliative care at either the policy, health professional or community levels. If provision of palliative care is to be effective, training is needed for policy makers, health professionals, community health workers, patients and their families. Everyone concerned needs to understand the basic principles of palliative care and how it can be delivered."

Help the Hospices

"Palliative Care is responsive to the nature and stages of illness and the cultural, social, and spiritual beliefs about illness and death. As population age and the burden of non-communicable diseases increase, the need for improving policy, practice and processes for delivering effective palliative care beyond cancer and HIV has become a global priority."

Primary Palliative Care Research Group,
University of Edinburgh

Life Before Death

LIFE Before Death is a documentary project comprising a feature film, a one-hour television program and 50 short films about the global crisis in untreated pain and the dramatic life-changing effect palliative care services can deliver to patients and their families around the world.
Read more ...

"Palliative care for all individuals in need is an urgent humanitarian responsibility."
World Health Assembly 2005

The story of Palliative Care

Click image to watch

See these excellent articles in the

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Drugs Banned, Many of World's Poor Suffer in Pain

In India, a Quest to Ease the Pain of the Dying
This article includes an interview with Dr Rajagopal of Pallium India, with contributions from Dr Mhoira Leng of Cairdeas.


© Cairdeas International Palliative Care Trust, 2011
Registered Scottish Charity No. SC037431