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Letter
Unmet need for cancer palliative care in India
  1. Shreyas Patil1,
  2. Parth Sharma1,2,
  3. Anoushka Arora1,3 and
  4. Siddhesh Zadey1,4,5,6
  1. 1Association for Socially Applicable, Pune, Maharashtra, India
  2. 2Department of Community Medicine, Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi, India
  3. 3Smt Nathiba Hargovandas Lakhmichand Municipal Medical College, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
  4. 4Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA
  5. 5Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York City, New York, USA
  6. 6Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth, Pune, Maharashtra, India
  1. Correspondence to Dr Parth Sharma, Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR), Pune, Maharashtra, India; parth.sharma25{at}gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/spcare-2024-004978

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    In 2022, India had an estimated 1.46 million cancer cases.1 Less than 1% of Indians receive opioid-based pain relief, a component of palliative care that can significantly improve their quality of life.2 However, a comprehensive assessment of India’s unmet need for palliative care remains missing.

    We assessed each cancer site based on sex and cancer type using the National Cancer Registry Programme (NCRP) 2020 report that compiles data from 58 hospital-based and 28 population-based cancer registries covering 10 cancer types in over 102.9 million individuals.3 Unmet need for palliative care was defined as the percentage of individuals with metastatic cancer who did not receive palliative care. This definition was in line with the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) recommendation that all patients with advanced cancer must receive dedicated palliative care in addition to treatment for cancer.4 Additionally, the number of individuals with unmet need was calculated based on multiplying the proportion of unmet …

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    Footnotes

    • X @parth_0013

    • Contributors Conceptualisation—PS and SZ. Data curation—SP. Formal analysis—AA and SP. Methodology—PS and AA. Project administration—PS. Supervision—SZ. Writing original draft—SP and PS. Review and editing—all authors.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests PS and SZ received honoraria for writing for Think Global Health, Harvard Public Health Magazine, The Wire Science and The Hindu. PS is the founder of Nivarana (www.nivarana.org), a public health information and advocacy platform. SZ is the co-founding director of the Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR); permanent council member of the G4 Alliance; chair of SOTA Care in South Asia Working Group, the G4 Alliance; and drafting committee member for Maharashtra State Mental Health Policy. The other authors have declared no conflicts of interest.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.