The prestigious EAPC Cicely Saunders Award was established in 2020 and it is given to an individual who has made a significant contribution to palliative care. We are delighted to announce that the winner for 2024 is Xavier Gómez-Batiste, Chair in Palliative Care at the Central University of Catalonia.
I am honoured to be awarded the EAPC Cicely Saunders Award. My personal role in establishing and developing comprehensive palliative care in Catalonia has been one shared with the EAPC for nearly forty years, so it seems fitting to have this chance to reflect on this journey for the EAPC blog.
Modern palliative care was initiated at St Christopher’s Hospice in 1967 by Cicely Saunders, who created a conceptual framework to identify the multidimensional needs of patients and their families. This included the concept of ‘total pain’, defined as the suffering that encompasses all of a person’s needs and which required a skilled multidisciplinary team to provide support. Since then, palliative care has evolved in sixty years to a diversity of services in all settings, including public health programs, developing a service which can offer timely palliative care approach to all types of patients in all services, identifying psychosocial (which means emotional, psychological and social needs, including aspects such as loneliness, poverty and exclusion) and spiritual needs as essential, as well as involving local communities, to achieve the challenge of palliative care access as a human right .
I was trained as a Help the Hospices’ fellow in a training journey funded by the Catalan Ministry of Health in 1986-87, and then started a palliative care comprehensive service in the city of Vic, Catalonia, in 1987. In the 1990’s, there was a keen interest in public health and palliative care, and I had the opportunity to design and implement the Catalonia World Health Organisation (WHO) Demonstration Project, which implemented a wide range of resources in the region, focused in care for people with terminal cancer (1).
In the early 2000’s, we knew that palliative care was needed by many different people, in all settings, and that it needed to be offered at an early stage of diagnosis with a life limiting illness. We developed a population-based comprehensive and integrated palliative approach, developing tools and policies to do so, with palliative care education and research, including palliative care as an essential element of the Catalan chronic care program (2). We promoted the idea of universal access to palliative care as a human right, which became part of the World Health Assembly resolution 67.19. We were designated a WHO Collaborating Center and I was privileged to be Medical Officer at WHO headquarters in Geneva to promote and implement this vision.
It was in 2008 that we had the opportunity to design and implement a program for the comprehensive care of people with advanced chronic conditions with La Caixa Foundation. This has enabled 71 teams focused in the psychosocial and spiritual care of these patients and their families in Spain and Portugal, and they have looked after nearly 700,000 people in 15 years (3). This project demonstrated effectiveness in improving the quality of life for both patients and families, particularly those facing social vulnerability, while also contributing valuable experience and evidence regarding the importance and complexity of addressing psychosocial and spiritual dimensions in care. Finally after 2010, the concept of compassionate communities was designed to actively involve the society in the city of Vic, 35 years after starting the first palliative care services there (4).
It has been a privilege to be an active participant of this journey since the 1980’s, learning from pioneers (Cicely Saunders, Eric Wilkes, Vittorio Ventafridda, Jan Stjernsward, Kathleen Foley, Irene Higginson and Allan Kellehear, among others) and to be able to implement these innovations in our context.
Professor Xavier Gómez-Batiste will be giving the Cicely Saunders Award presentation ‘Developing palliative care towards universal coverage: Psychosocial and spiritual care as human rights of persons with advanced chronic conditions’ as part of the opening ceremony at the EAPC’s 13th World Research Congress in Barcelona in May 2024.
References
- Gómez-Batiste X, Blay C, Martínez-Muñoz M, et al. The Catalonia WHO Demonstration Project of Palliative Care: results at 25 years (1990-2015). J Pain Symptom Manage 2015; 52; 1: 92-99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2015.11.029.
- Gómez-Batiste X, Lasmarías C, Amblàs J, et al. Chair ICO/UVIC-UCC of palliative care at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia: an innovative multidisciplinary model of education, research and knowledge transfer. BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care doi:10.1136/bmjspcare-2018-001656.
- Gómez-Batiste X, Buisan M, Gonzalez MP, et al. The “La Caixa” Foundation and WHO Collaborating Center Spanish National Program for Enhancing Psychosocial and Spiritual Palliative Care for Patients with Advanced Diseases, and their Families: Preliminary Findings. Palliative & Supportive Care 2011;9(3):239-249. G7
- Gomez-Batiste X, Mateu S, Serra Jofre S et al Compassionate communities: design and preliminary results of the experience of Vic (Barcelona, Spain) caring city. Ann Palliat Med 2018 doi: 10.21037/apm.2018.03.10
Links and resources
- Find out more about La Caixa Foundation, offering care for people with advanced illness.
- Learn about palliative care at the Central University of Catalonia.
About the author
Professor Xavier Gómez-Batiste, MD, PhD is full Professor of Palliative Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (UVICUCC). He was trained as medical oncologist and undertook palliative care training in the UK in 1986-87, developing afterwards the first service in Spain, and leading the Catalonia WHO Demonstration Project of palliative care implementation. Xavier was director of the palliative care service at the Catalan Institute of Oncology for 30 years. He was Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for palliative care public health programmes (2008-2021) and Medical Officer of palliative and long term care at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. Since 2008, he has been scientific director of the La Caixa Foundation Comprehensive Program for people with advanced chronic conditions and has been developing tools and policies to insert palliative care and psychosocial spiritual care as elements of the chronic care programs and for it to be considered universally accessible as a human right.
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