Abstract
Palliative care is an effective, multidisciplinary healthcare service to alleviate severe illness patients from physical, psychological, and spiritual pain. However, global palliative care has been underutilized, especially in developing countries. This cross-sectional survey aimed to examine the factors associated with older cancer patients’ willingness to utilize palliative care services in Myanmar. The final sample was composed of 141 older adults, 50-years of age and above who suffered from cancers at any stage. Simple random sampling was applied to choose the participants by purposively selecting three oncology clinics with daycare chemotherapy centers in Mandalay. We collected data using structured questionnaires composed of five sections. The sections include the participant’s socio-economic information, disease status, knowledge of palliative care, psychosocial and spiritual need, practical need, and willingness to utilize palliative care services. The study found that approximately 85% of older cancer patients are willing to receive palliative care services. The significant predictors of willingness to utilize palliative care services include place of living, better palliative care knowledge, more need for spiritual and psychosocial support, and practical support. This study can guide health policymakers in increasing the rate of palliative care utilization. The suggested policies include developing community-level palliative care services in Myanmar, especially in rural areas, promoting palliative care knowledge, applying appropriate religious and spiritual traditions at palliative treatment, and developing suitable medicines for the critically ill.
Highlights
Palliative care is a multidisciplinary healthcare process to improve patients’ quality of life and their families by alleviating or reducing suffering from severe illness patients’physical, psychological, and spiritual pain [1]
Most had low education (44%), had an income not more than 700,000 Kyats/year (76.6%), and 53.9% lived in rural areas
We found that patients living in rural areas were more willing to utilize palliative care services than patients in urban areas
Summary
Palliative care is a multidisciplinary healthcare process to improve patients’ quality of life and their families by alleviating or reducing suffering from severe illness patients’. Physical, psychological, and spiritual pain [1]. Early work is the fundamental concept of palliative care, recognizing that pain is a physiological experience and encompasses spiritual, psychological, and social dimensions [3]. Updated the term of palliative care in 2002 as “an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual” [4,5].
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