World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
World Hospice and Palliative Care Day (WHPCD) is a unified day of action to celebrate and support hospice and palliative care around the world every second Saturday in October. To mark WHPCD 2024, thousands of people around the world will be coming together on the 12th October 2024 to celebrate, but most importantly to speak out about their lived experiences with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions.
Palliative Care and Digital Legacy
The Digital Legacy Association is the global, not for profit organisation championing the need for digital assets planning and digital legacy safeguarding to be a recognised element of palliative care. Our ongoing work includes:
- Raising awareness about digital assets planning and digital legacy safeguarding
- Carrying out research
- Writing and advising policy documentation
- Training care professionals
- Developing areas of best practice
- Assisting health, social care, technology, legal, funeral and other related professional organisations and professionals
- Publishing free to access resources, tutorials and frameworks.
For nearly 10 years we have argued and continue to argue that digital legacy planning should be seen as both an emerging area of advance care planning and be included as a holistic approach to advance care planning. We have raised awareness within academia, evoked action at national and individual levels and trained tens of thousands of professionals across the globe with this increasingly important area.
We congratulate the the World Health Assembly’s stand alone resolution on Palliative Care and look forward to continuing our support it’s development and ongoing impact in the years to come.
About World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
The year 2024 marks 10 years since the World Health Assembly (WHO’s Governing Body) passed the only stand-alone resolution on palliative care, calling for all countries to “strengthen palliative care as a component of comprehensive care throughout the life course.”
WHPCD 2024 is a day where communities, institutions, and healthcare providers, unite and raise their voices to advocate for palliative care policies and programmes that support the strategic development goal of good health and well-being. Palliative care development follows a public health model developed by the WHO that emphasizes policy, education, medication availability, community empowerment, research, and implementation. There are many barriers to achieving each of these components.
