"Major international efforts are underway to address the pandemic lack of availability and accessibility of opioids for the benefit of cancer patients (and other patients) in pain that affects the majority of the emerging economies and the developing world. The authors applaud recent progress on the global stage through inclusion of a specific target on access to essential medicines for cancer and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the WHO Global NCD Action Plan 2013–2020. In addition, the WHO plan includes a specific indicator on morphine consumption in the associated Global Monitoring Framework (http://www.who.int/nmh/en/). Clearly, factors such as economic and social development are contributory; however, pilot projects in Uganda and Vietnam have demonstrated robustly that economic development is not an insurmountable barrier to the routine provision of pain medication for cancer patients suffering with severe pain."
"The Global Opioid Policy Initiative (GOPI) members are partnering with other key civil society and intergovernmental agency players in the global efforts that are underway to improve accessibility to opioids for patients with cancer pain. The EAPC, the WHO, and Help the Hospices are key partners in the Access to Opioid Medication in Europe (ATOME) project (www.atome-project.eu). The ATOME project is a multiyear collaborative project involving 10 organizations to improve access to opioids across Europe by identifying and removing barriers that prevent people from accessing medicines that could improve end-of-life care, to alleviate debilitating pain, and to treat heroin dependence. It focuses on 12 target countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey."
"The ‘Global Access to Pain Relief Initiative’ (GAPRI) is another major international effort led by the UICC (www.uicc.org/programmes/gapri). This ambitious collaborative project aims to contribute to the World Cancer Declaration target of universal access to essential pain medications by the year 2020."
"GAPRI is partnering with The Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin to support and train clinical leaders in tandem with regulatory representatives from the same country through an International Pain Policy Fellowship Program [32]."
"Further, the American Cancer Society's ‘Treat the Pain’ campaign is implementing projects in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, India, and Haiti that are providing 2.8 million additional days of pain treatment."
"In addition to these three major multinational programs, critical contributions have been made by the International Palliative Care Initiative of the Open Society Foundation (OSF) led by Kathleen Foley and Mary Callaway (www.opensocietyfoundations.org), the Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance (WPCA) led by Stephen Connor (www.thewpca.org), the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) led by Liliana De Lima (http://hospicecare.com/home/), the Human Rights Watch Palliative Care Project led by Diederik Lohman (www.hrw.org/topic/health/palliative-care), Help the Hospices (www.helpthehospices.org.uk), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the Center for Global Health of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) (www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/globalhealth) and the World Health Organization (WHO) (www.who.int)."
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