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Plenary Address: The future of palliative care in the UK: Learning from policy and practice in a pandemic.
Session Description
Professor Katherine Sleeman, UK
BSc MBBS MRCP PhD
BSc MBBS MRCP PhD
Laing Galazka Chair in Palliative Care, King’s College London
NIHR Clinician Scientist, King’s College London
Honorary Consultant in Palliative Medicine, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Overview:
The UK is the birthplace of the hospice movement, and came top of the 2015 Economist Intelligence Unit 'Quality of Death' index. And yet hundreds of thousands of people die each year in the UK needing palliative care but not receiving it. And there are persistent - and sometimes growing - inequalities in access to care including by age, diagnosis, deprivation and ethnicity. Future projections have shown that there will be large increases in the number of people who die with palliative care needs, both globally in the UK. These increases will be driven by ageing and dementia, populations who are historically least likely to access palliative care.
The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust death, dying and bereavement into the spotlight. Over 130,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the UK, and there has been intense public and policy focus on the cumulative number of daily deaths. However, how the pandemic affected experiences and care needs of people approaching death has had little scrutiny.
In this talk I will consider the essential role of palliative care for older people and people with dementia; present UK and global data on the escalating need for palliative care in these populations; make the case for the existence of an 'evidence-policy gap' in palliative and end of life care and why this matters; and highlight the unanticipated opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has presented to close the 'evidence-policy gap' and drive improvements in care for people near the end of life.
Overview:
The UK is the birthplace of the hospice movement, and came top of the 2015 Economist Intelligence Unit 'Quality of Death' index. And yet hundreds of thousands of people die each year in the UK needing palliative care but not receiving it. And there are persistent - and sometimes growing - inequalities in access to care including by age, diagnosis, deprivation and ethnicity. Future projections have shown that there will be large increases in the number of people who die with palliative care needs, both globally in the UK. These increases will be driven by ageing and dementia, populations who are historically least likely to access palliative care.
The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust death, dying and bereavement into the spotlight. Over 130,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the UK, and there has been intense public and policy focus on the cumulative number of daily deaths. However, how the pandemic affected experiences and care needs of people approaching death has had little scrutiny.
In this talk I will consider the essential role of palliative care for older people and people with dementia; present UK and global data on the escalating need for palliative care in these populations; make the case for the existence of an 'evidence-policy gap' in palliative and end of life care and why this matters; and highlight the unanticipated opportunities that the Covid-19 pandemic has presented to close the 'evidence-policy gap' and drive improvements in care for people near the end of life.
