National palliative care measures

This measure is about ensuring that people with life-limiting illnesses receive effective care that minimises avoidable physical discomfort. Physical symptoms change across the illness trajectory, so this measure looks at improvements across palliative care phases. A palliative care phase is a clinically meaningful period in a patient’s condition (stable, unstable, deteriorating, terminal). This measure uses patient-reported data to assess the level of patient distress related to pain.    

The desired outcome is that fewer people with life-limiting illnesses experience distress from pain, meaning the measure will increase.

Objective area: Effective     Outcome area: Physical wellbeing

Trends

In 2018, people with life-limiting illnesses reported that their distress related to pain improved or remained at a low level in 71.1% of palliative care phases (recorded in the PCOC data collection). This remained stable over the 4 years to 2022 (Figure 1.1.1). Note, these findings should be interpreted with caution as the number of services participating in PCOC increased between 2018 and 2022.   

Figure 1.1.1: Proportion of palliative care phases for people with life-limiting illnesses for which the distress related to pain improved or remained at a low level after intervention, 2018–2022

Characteristics

In 2022, the proportion of palliative care phases for which distress related to pain improved or remained at a low level after intervention, varied by some characteristics and not others. Note, these findings should be interpreted with caution as the representativeness of the PCOC data collection across different demographic characteristics is unknown (see Data sources for more information).

Figure 1.1.2 highlights that the proportion of palliative care phases where the distress related to pain improved or remained at a low level over the phase was:

• similar for males (70.6%) and females (70.7%)
• steadily increasing with age from age group 35–44 (63.6%) to 85 and over (75.6%)
• higher among people with non-malignant diagnoses (77.5%) than malignant diagnoses (68.2%)
• similar for people from varying socioeconomic areas, ranging from 69.3% for people from the lowest socioeconomic areas to 71.4% for people from the highest socioeconomic areas
• similar for people from varying remoteness areas (ranging from 68.9% to 71.4%) except for those from Very remote areas (63.0%)
• higher among people in inpatient settings (75.2%) than community settings (67.0%)
• similar for unstable, deteriorating, and terminal phases (ranging from 74.5% to 76.4%) but considerably lower for stable phases (62.1%)
• highest for phases where distress from pain was severe at phase start (81.3%) and lowest where distress from pain was absent at phase start (68.9%).

Figure 1.1.2: Proportion of palliative care phases for people with life-limiting illnesses for which the distress related to pain improved or remained at a low level after intervention, by selected characteristics, 2022