Out of the shadows: non-communicable diseases and palliative care in Africa.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Africa have been comparatively neglected, partly due to donor-driven funding priorities. This is despite NCDs being the principal cause of mortality globally, with the majority incidence occurring in low-income and middle-income nations. Most of the patients with NCDs will suffer from pain, breathlessness and other physical symptoms, or need support with psychosocial or spiritual problems. Reflecting regional disease prevalence, late-stage clinical presentation, limited funding and restricted access to curative therapies, palliative care need in Africa is significantly high. Although palliative care provision has advanced significantly on the continent in the past decade, much of this development was driven by services for adult HIV patients. However, recent international and regional political declarations and commitments constitute a new global NCD agenda that calls for the integration of palliative care into the NCD response. This could be achieved under a chronic care model of service provision in partnership with other clinical providers in an integrated care continuum spanning prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship and the end of life. Four important challenges have to be addressed if palliative care is to contribute meaningfully to this NCD agenda: (1) existing variation in the ability of countries to deal with NCDs per se; (2) ensuring clinical partners are integrated effectively with palliative care; (3) agreeing implementation is linked to relevant national-level and patient-level metrics; and (iv) underpinning palliative care and NCD care with a rigorous and locally relevant evidence base demonstrating appropriate, feasible and effective care.

Formulary availability and regulatory barriers to accessibility of opioids for cancer pain in Africa: a report from the Global Opioid Policy Initiative (GOPI).

With nearly 1.1 billion inhabitants living in more than 50 countries, Africa is the world's poorest and most socioeconomically underdeveloped continent. Despite some advances for individual states, many African countries have very low opioid consumption and, overall, the continent has the lowest consumption per capita of any in the world. This article presents the findings of the first systematic study of the availability and accessibility of opioids for the management of cancer pain across the continent. Data are reported on the availability and accessibility of opioids for the management of cancer pain in 25 of 52 countries, with 744 million of the region's 1127 million people (66%) covered by the survey. Many countries had severely restricted formularies of opioids and only 15 of 25 had morphine available in oral IR, CR and injectable formulations. Even when opioids are on formulary they are often unavailable, and access is significantly impaired by widespread over-regulation that is pervasive across the region.