Provocations on privilege in palliative care: Are we meeting our core mandate?

While increasingly recognized as a human right, access to hospice and palliative care is still not a given. Even though palliative care as a concept seems to be unanimously supported, that is what it remains: an idea that only becomes reality for people privileged enough to access it. Those who do benefit tend to also benefit from high socio-economic status and family support. People who are facing the end-of-life who also face social and structural inequities like poverty, homelessness, racism, and stigma, are not so privileged. Modern day hospice and palliative care services are vital to ensuring high-quality care for those who are dying but such services may, albeit unintentionally, serve to privilege some people in need of palliative care while rendering ‘others’ invisible. In doing so, inequities in the provision of palliative care have been created that challenge the very root structure from which early hospice care originated.