Australia, New Zealand and Ireland also scored highly, while Iraq and Bangladesh were ranked the worst.
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To make their findings, researchers assessed hospital and hospice environments, the number of staff and their skills, and the affordability and quality of care across 80 countries.
Just 34 out of 80 countries provided what could be classed as good end-of-life care – and these accounted for just 15% of the adult population. He remarks the importance of seeing this issue as a community, with “collective ambition”. Uganda, Mongolia, Chile and Panama have been singled out here while in countries like China and India the situation is described as worrying. Albeit palliative consideration is frequently erroneously seen as end of consideration, its really meant to bolster patients and families all through the treatment direction for growth and different genuine illnesses.
Despite the UK’s top ranking, experts warn that there is still room for improvement as the population continues to live longer and deaths become more “drawn out”.
End-of-life care in the United Kingdom has been ranked as the best in the world with a study praising the quality and availability of services.
The upper echelons of the index are dominated by wealthy European, Asia-Pacific and north American countries. In general, it shows that higher income countries are more likely to provide better palliative care, although a few developing nations were climbing up the list fast.
The U.S. was ranked ninth.
Despite the UK’s top ranking, the study’s authors say it is “still not providing adequate services for every citizen”. He added that Taiwan could stand to improve even more if it could increase diagnostic awareness to aid in determining which patients would benefit from palliative care, as well as increasing infrastructure to more remote regions of the island.
“We only have one chance to get care right for people who are dying, which is why we very much hope that the Government continues to look to improve end of life care for everyone who needs it and invests in caring for dying people in the forthcoming spending review, including by implementing the recommendations contained in the recent review of choice at the end of life”.
“Palliative care” is the term used to describe care of those with conditions likely or certain to kill them.
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Lien Foundation’s 2014 Death Attitudes survey found that only half of Singaporeans were aware of hospice palliative care and only one-third of respondents could correctly define what hospice care was.
