Children’s palliative care and public health: position statement

A public health approach to palliative care has been developed in adult palliative care over several years. Despite the concepts of health and wellbeing, and palliation, dying and death appearing at first to be contradictory, a cogent argument has been made to understand palliative care in the context of promoting public health. However, the application to children’s palliative care has not been articulated in depth. The need for and development of children’s palliative care is well documented globally, with the public health model, and more recently the WHO conceptual model for palliative care development being key to ongoing development and progress in service delivery. Engaging communities to influence care provision is essential and important to ensure provision of appropriate and sustainable care. Positioning children’s palliative care within the public health perspective transforms care and service provision and centres around the child, their childhood and their carers, as part of the community and the wider population. Access to healthcare is vital, of course, but so is access to childhoods which guarantee children’s human rights and access to being a child living a childhood, whether that childhood is long, short or leads to an adulthood. Uncovering differing perspectives on the intersection of public health and children’s palliative care that varied between global regions, led to the development of eight statements. Our collaboration between colleagues in seven countries in different regions has allowed us to set out the context of the children’s palliative public health approach. This reflects a balancing of medical/nursing professionalised care and partnerships, co production and participation of communities. The public health approach to children’s palliative care is radical, it is transformational, and means changing how we do things in order to improve the lives of children with palliative care needs and their families around the world.