Measuring Palliative Care Outcomes in Humanitarian Settings

At the 2014 World Health Assembly, a commitment was made to better integrate Palliative Care into humanitarian emergencies. However, the integration of a palliative care in humanitarian assistance will not be simple. There is significant variance in the availability of palliative care across and within countries. There is poor understanding of palliative care needs and interventions in humanitarian contexts such as famine. There is little understanding of the transferability of existing palliative care interventions to the crisis context and of the barriers and enablers to the integration of palliative care into humanitarian emergencies. The perceptions of palliative care by patients, communities and local caregivers is often unknown. Finally, there is a lack of understanding of the applicability of tools to measure palliative care outcomes in humanitarian contexts. This study aims to describe the state of evidence associated with the provision of palliative care in humanitarian settings, develop and trial tools to measure palliative care outcomes in humanitarian settings.