A Reflection on World Humanitarian Day 2025 by Joan Marston
The theme for 2025 is “Strengthening Global Solidarity and Empowering Local Communities”. World Humanitarian Day is commemorated every year on 19 August to pay tribute to humanitarian workers killed and injured in the course of their work, and to honour all aid and health workers who continue to provide life-saving support and protection to people most in need.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that in 2025, 305 million people will need humanitarian aid, with Sudan and Afghanistan having the greatest number of people affected.
The major causes are conflict, climate change, and economic insecurity. These lead to displacement, food insecurity, malnutrition, trauma, disability, high mortality, disease outbreaks – and overwhelming suffering. Harsh cuts to humanitarian aid have exacerbated the situation and will lead to further deaths as access to essential medications such as for Non- Communicable Diseases and anti-retroviral therapy is predicted to lead to increased suffering and deaths.
While estimates of the need for palliative care have been made globally, there is little information on the increased need in humanitarian settings.
In the face of this overwhelming suffering across the world- what can palliative care do?
It is essential we learn from the expertise of our colleagues working in the humanitarian health response field and collaborate with them. We can use all of our palliative care expertise and knowledge – but we need to learn to adapt these to a humanitarian setting, where we can contribute within the humanitarian triage system, and importantly within the coordinated emergency response. Collaboration is key.
Colleagues in Ukraine who were called to work as front-line medics used their knowledge and expertise to provide improved pain and symptom management and to teach others. We can learn from our courageous colleagues in countries such as Ukraine and Sudan, who have maintained and continued to develop palliative care in difficult humanitarian settings.
Using technology effectively is essential. We can provide education, guidelines, as well as consultation via technology. Access to essential palliative care medicines is often interrupted – the palliative care community can be a powerful movement to advocate for improved access to these in humanitarian settings and promote the legislation which allows faster movement of essential medicines across borders.
Our expertise in communication, counselling, end-of-life care, spiritual support, and bereavement care can be taught, translated and provided through technology.
- We can plan for and include colleagues in developing research and educational programmes.
- We can support access to palliative care for refugees, as in Uganda, and those who have fled humanitarian crises and then work across borders to provide support in their home countries.
- We can advocate to our countries to include palliative care in their emergency health response plans.
While we may feel helpless in the face of the increasing size of the need, colleagues caught up in often horrifying situations say that knowing there are people who care and reach out, helping where they can, advocating for help, raising resources and encouraging them, has helped them. Many have said to me that their faith, and the support of their friends, have kept them going.
We honour the courage of our colleagues who continue to work in dangerous humanitarian settings, whether from the country’s own health care workforce or from humanitarian health response agencies, providing essential care with limited resources.
We honour the memory of the many humanitarian workers killed in the course of their work. They should never be a target.
We are grateful for the learning from their experiences, and we ask that humanitarian health be taught in all health-related and palliative care education.
PallCHASE will be bringing out a Position Paper this month that can be shared widely and used for advocacy at local, national, regional and global level. We can then build an effective humanitarian palliative care movement to provide relief for some part of the overwhelming suffering caused by humanitarian crises.
If you are interested in this field, you are invited to join PallCHASE and become active on one of the working groups Advocacy, Communication, Education, and Research,
Author
Joan Marston
Co-founder and co-lead of the Advocacy Committee
Palliative Care in Humanitarian Aid Situations and Emergencies
info@pallchase.org
+27 82296 4367
