MyGlasgow News

Professor David Clark has accepted a place to join the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative-Lancet Commission on Global Access to Pain Control and Palliative Care.

The position dovetails directly with Professor Clark’s work on palliative care which has just been funded by the Wellcome Trust for the next four years, starting in 2015.

The purpose of the commission is as follows:

“The lack of global access to pain control and palliative care throughout the life cycle constitutes a global crisis and action to close this divide between rich and poor is a moral, health and ethical imperative. Global and national health systems solutions exist that can close this divide; lack of financial resources is not the limiting factor. Yet, efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage - a now widely accepted goal of health systems – have largely ignored the need for pain control and palliative care. The issue has seldom if at all been considered through a health system lens applying a diagonal approach that considers chronicity of illness and works across diseases. By coupling evidence-based advocacy with advocacy-inspired evidence we can identify and implement policies and programs that would end the tragedy of health and travesty of justice of permitting poor patients to suffer unnecessary pain, while simultaneously helping all people to avoid unnecessary suffering during and at end of life.”

Professor David Clark said “I am delighted to have been invited to take part in this extremely important commission and look forward to working with international colleagues in the field of palliative care to form solutions to help those avoid unnecessary suffering at the end of life.”

For more information, go to http://hgei.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k62597&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup191254

---

First published: 24 October 2014