Sri Lanka
“Palliative care helps to improve the quality of life of patients in Sri Lanka. Though some headway has been made under the Lien Collaborative, we need to do more especially in the area of integrating palliative care into the healthcare systems.”
“We also need to make changes to our policies to provide the dying with better, greater and easier access to pain relief medications.”
– Assoc Prof Ghauri Aggarwal, co-leader of the Lien Collaborative’s Sri Lanka program and palliative care specialist from Concord Hospital, Australia.
According to the Global Atlas of Palliative Care, published jointly by the WHO and the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA), Sri Lanka suffers from inadequate access and availability of hospice and palliative care. Its palliative care activities are heavily donor dependent and hence unsustainable.
The usage of morphine is generally low with annual average consumption of less than 5mg/capita, well below world average, contrary to the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of oral morphine as the gold standard and essential medication for pain relief that should be available to suffering patients. The scarcity of palliative care and pain relief medicines in Asian countries like Sri Lanka are compounded by other socio-economic issues such as poverty, high patient load and overcrowding at public hospitals and healthcare facilities.
