Much remains to be done in Ireland if end-of-life care is to be given to everyone who needs it, a leading medic in hospice care said yesterday.
Prof David Clark, medical sociologist, said that in Ireland almost 30,000 people died each year and over 6,000 people used hospice services on an annual basis. However, around the world palliative hospital care provision for people in need was desperate, he said.
Speaking at the Royal Irish Academy, he said that where the need was greatest, the fewest hospice and palliative care services existed. There was unrelieved suffering on a mass scale and the efforts of a handful of activists to promote palliative care globally were often ignored.
"Palliative care is underdeveloped globally to an extent that shames us all. Good care at the end of life and a dignified death should be regarded as basic human rights to which everyone has access when the time comes."
Prof Clark said globally a new alliance of activists had been formed and some major funders and philanthropists were taking an interest in hospice care.
He said several Irish organisations had been involved since the early 1990s in supporting the work of Hospice Africa Uganda. Major benefits to the whole region had flowed from this.
"There is a huge need for more partnerships between Irish organisations concerned about palliative care and their counterparts in resource-poor countries."
A recent study reviewed hospice and palliative care around the world, country by country.
"Just under a half of the world's countries have established one or more hospice or palliative care services, but only 15 per cent of countries have developed in such a way that palliative care is achieving a measure of integration with wider mainstream service providers. Even there, coverage is often still limited," he said.
In just under one-fifth of countries, researchers had found interest among committed individuals who would like to do more, but as yet no palliative care services or hospices were operational there. In one-third of countries, no hospice or palliative care activity of any kind could be identified, he said.
Prof Clark is visiting professor of hospice studies at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. The Irish Hospice Foundation is funding his post until 2008.