Updated 13/09/2026
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Plain-language summary of research published in the Georgian Medical Journal. Written for the general public by the GMJ News editorial team.
The World Health Organization estimates that roughly 56.8 million people worldwide need palliative care every year — yet globally, only about 14% of them receive it. A policy-oriented review in the Georgian Medical Journal argues that palliative care shouldn’t be treated as a narrow specialty question, but read as a direct indicator of how well an entire health system is performing.
A Global Mismatch Between Need and Access
The Lancet Commission on Palliative Care and Pain Relief estimates more than 61 million people experience serious health-related suffering annually, driven largely by cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, neurological disorders, and advanced organ failure. That burden is set to grow: demographic ageing and the rising prevalence of non-communicable diseases are expected to substantially increase global demand for palliative care in the coming decades — making today’s access gap a preview of a larger problem, not a stable baseline.
What the Review Actually Did
This is a policy-oriented narrative review and conceptual analysis, synthesising evidence from three complementary sources: global research on palliative care needs, Georgia-specific literature and policy frameworks on palliative care development and opioid access, and national health system statistics on infrastructure, workforce, and service utilisation — brought together to examine how the structural characteristics of Georgia’s health system shape access to palliative care and pain management specifically.
At a glance — the headline figures.
The review’s central move is reframing: it treats palliative care not as an isolated clinical service to be assessed on its own terms, but as what it calls a tracer condition — a single, measurable thread that reveals equity of access, continuity of care, and the availability of essential medicines across the whole health system. In Georgia specifically, the review identifies services concentrated in urban centres, limited community- and home-based models, workforce training gaps, and regulatory barriers around opioid prescribing as the structural factors behind the access gap — meaning fixing palliative care access, the authors argue, requires system-level change, not a specialty-level fix alone.
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Read the Original Research
Original article: The Care Georgia Isn’t Counting: Palliative Care as a Measure of the Whole Health System
Published in: Georgian Medical Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19050661
📄 Read the full article at gmj.ge →
Georgian Medical Journal (GMJ) · ISSN 3088-4322 · gmj.ge · Open Access CC BY 4.0 · Published by the Public Health Institute of Georgia (PHIG). This summary is an independent editorial product of GMJ News; for clinical decisions, consult the original peer-reviewed article and a qualified professional.
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