Barriers to Hospice and Palliative Care in Developing Countries and its Moral Implications

While palliative and hospice care were generally well established in most developed countries, with many centres and professionals providing suitable care and treatments to patients in different situations, this type of treatment to patients in their final period of life is almost non-existing in most developing countries. There are many barriers that impeded the process of development of the palliative care in developing countries. In this paper we discuss the potential barriers to the implementation of palliative and hospice care in developing countries, including its moral implications. Here, we analyse key topics related to palliative and hospice care and analyse this special type of treatment through three perspectives: its definition and meaning, its potential barriers in developing countries, and its moral implications. We discuss the similarities and differences among these three terms: palliative, hospice, and curative care and go on to investigate the potential barriers that pose difficulties for this type of end-of-life care to establish in developing countries, especially China and India. We then go on to investigate the moral issues that involve in the practice of palliative care and discuss the critical concepts morality highlighting the typical moral challenges encountered when administering this type of care.