Although the World Health Organization (WHO) considers palliative care an integral component of cancer care and has urged countries to improve its availability, too often palliative care continues to be the neglected child of the health care family, receiving low priority from health policy makers and health care professionals and almost no funding. This is despite the fact that experts estimate that 60 percent of those who die each year in the developing world—a staggering 33 million people—need palliative care.
- Access to controlled medicines
Our calculations confirm that more than 3.5 million terminal cancer and HIV/AIDS patients die each year without access to adequate pain treatment, a very conservative estimate that assumes that all opioids are used to treat this patient group. It should be considered merely an indicator of the enormous unmet need for pain treatment. In reality, the limited opioids that are available are used to treat patients suffering pain from other causes too. So the real number of terminal cancer and HIV/AIDS patients with untreated pain must be higher, and many other patients with non-terminal cancer, HIV/AIDS, and with other diseases are also suffering untreated pain.
- Access to controlled medicines