Paper details

Paper authors	Shahaduz Zaman
In panel on	Palliative care in humanitarian action: Moving from awareness to integration
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of the need for palliative and end-of-life care globally and within the humanitarian sector, there is no clear consensus regarding what constitutes a “good death” or how care can be offered in culturally and contextually appropriate ways at the end of life. The direct transfer of palliative care models developed in the Global North to humanitarian interventions in the Global South may fail to address local priorities and perspectives around death and dying. Rather than privileging a common approach to palliative and end-of-life care, we suggest the need for a healthcare delivery approach that is adaptable and sustainable to the contextual realities of the care of the dying in humanitarian crises. Multi-directional learning between and among countries in the Global North and South is needed to develop a suite of possible interventions that can be translated to local contexts. While dying is a universal human experience, we argue for a plurality of dying in terms of how palliative and end-of-life care should be addressed in humanitarian crises in different contexts.

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