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Review
. 2025 Jul;25(4):100320.
doi: 10.1016/j.clinme.2025.100320. Epub 2025 May 5.

Palliative care: what's the evidence?

Sophie Pask  1 , Fliss E M Murtagh  1 , Jason W Boland  2
Affiliations
Review

Palliative care: what's the evidence?

Sophie Pask et al. Clin Med (Lond). 2025 Jul.

Abstract

Palliative care is essential for people with an advanced life-limiting illness. Most palliative care is delivered by healthcare professionals who do not specialise in palliative care ('non-specialists'). Multidisciplinary specialist palliative care services manage more complex problems, providing more comprehensive support when needed. Both 'non-specialist' and specialist palliative care improve patient and family outcomes and reduce formal healthcare costs. However, there are inconsistencies in the delivery of, and access to, 'non-specialist' and specialist palliative care. These inconsistencies and inequities lead to unrecognised and unmet palliative care needs. There is also inconsistent referral to specialist palliative care services. Unless there are greater resources and training, these issues will be exacerbated by an increasing need for palliative care with changing population demographics.

Keywords: Dying; Healthcare costs; Palliative care; Quality of life; Specialist palliative care; Symptoms.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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