World Hospice & Palliative Care Day 2025 – Achieving the Promise: Universal Access to Palliative Care

World Hospice & Palliative Care Day 2025 – Achieving the Promise: Universal Access to Palliative Care

– Dr. Stephen Connor, Virginia, USA

This year we celebrate the 20^th anniversary of World Hospice & Palliative Care Day (World Day). What started as ‘Voices for Hospice’ concerts around the world turned into a day to recognise hospice and palliative care starting in 2005. Having a day each year to recognise the importance of hospice and palliative care is a valuable part of every health care movement and is essential for advocacy and awareness raising.

World Day is organised by the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance each second Saturday in October, this year on 11 October 2025, on behalf of the global palliative care community, including international, national, and regional palliative care organisations such as the IAHPC, ICPCN, PallCHASE, APCA, EAPC, ALCP, APHN, and including national organisations such as the IAPC.

Each year, a different theme is chosen to highlight a specific aspect of palliative care or to challenge myths or misconceptions about palliative care. Last year was the 10^th anniversary of the passage of the World Health Assembly (WHA) resolution on palliative care, and the theme Ten Years Since the Resolution: How are we doing? was an opportunity to look at how much or how little progress was made in the decade. This year’s theme, Achieving the Promise: Universal Access to Palliative Care, builds on last year’s to explore what is needed in the coming 5-10 years to build toward universal access to palliative care, especially as part of universal health coverage.

The subthemes this year are:

1. Empowering people and compassionate communities
2. Implement palliative care policies to improve access
3. Integrate palliative care fully into healthcare systems through UHC

Palliative care integration into UHC strengthens health system efficiency and patient outcomes. According to the World Health Organization, integrating palliative care into UHC ensures continuity of care, improves patient satisfaction, and reduces unnecessary hospitalisations and costs. Health systems with integrated palliative care reduce intensive care use at the end of life, promoting both patient dignity and cost-effective care.

Furthermore, integrating palliative care into healthcare systems is integral to the achievement of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), including financial risk protection. Further access to quality essential healthcare services and access to safe, effective, quality, and affordable essential medicines for all are essential. The world and key stakeholders need to realise the urgent need to include palliation across the continuum of care, especially at the primary care level, recognising that inadequate integration of palliative care into health and social care systems is a major contributing factor to the lack of equitable access to such care.

Everyone deserves the best care possible, regardless of who they are or where they live in the world. Palliative care is yet to be fully integrated into the healthcare system of most countries, especially the low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges faced in the healthcare system. While most of the need for palliative care is being met in high-income countries, only about 4% of the need is being met in LMICs.

WHPCA produces a toolkit each year to provide templated materials based on the current year’s theme for anyone to use to promote World Day. You can find the toolkit and related materials on our website at: https://thewhpca.org/world-hospice-and-palliative-care-day/. The toolkit covers many areas including an explanation of the year’s theme and sub-themes, key messages and key ask, sample social media messages and hashtags to use, fundraising ideas, logos, campaign branding and additional resources such as templates for press releases, government petition letters, tips for working with media and photo shoots, and ideas for events.

We encourage you to involve people with lived experience (PWLE) of palliative care in planning for and delivering your events. PWLE are our most impactful speakers and representatives to advocate for palliative care and include those who are or were receiving palliative care, caregivers, and bereaved family members. When looking for PWLE we caution not to use our relationship with them to impose on them to advocate, but to seek out those who wish to give back by sharing their experiences. Organisations that represent palliative care but are not providing direct care can work with their provider members to identify PWLE wishing to support palliative care by making videos, statements, or speaking on behalf of palliative care.

This year, our KEY ASK is Full Integration of Palliative Care into Health Systems in the Next Five Years. We are also asking those planning events to complete our ‘Call to Action’ on the website at: https://thewhpca.org/share-your-story/. Don’t let palliative care progress fall behind. Ensure that the palliative care resolution is effectively realised over the next decade. Demand that governments include palliative care and relief of suffering in their plans for universal health coverage. WHAT CONCRETE ACTION WILL YOU TAKE TO REALISE THIS ASK?

Please also register your event on the website event page at: https://thewhpca.org/world-day-2025/. This will include information on your plans as well as any logos or graphics for your event. Your event will also show up on the map of all World Day events. This has to be done by us manually after you submit your event, so it may take a day or so to appear.

Why do we need WHPCD? Palliative Care is a major unmet need across the world. Our work with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the Global Atlas of Palliative Care showed that only 14% of the over 73 million adults and children in need of palliative care services receive it. Some 20 million people die every year in pain and suffering due to a lack of access to palliative care and pain relief. Palliative care development should follow the public health model developed by the WHO that emphasises policy, education, medication availability, community empowerment, research, and implementation. There are many barriers to achieving each of these components.

World Hospice and Palliative Care Day is a vital opportunity to raise awareness and mobilise support for palliative care from communities and governments worldwide. Please make the effort to plan events on World Day and let us know your plans.