Global health leaders, clinicians, advocates, and policymakers gathered during the 79th World Health Assembly for a side event focused on strengthening coordinated global action to improve equitable access to effective pain care. The event highlighted pain as a major yet under-addressed global health challenge that cuts across diseases, populations, and health systems.
Globally, pain is one of the most common and challenging experiences associated with illness and injury, yet access to effective pain care remains highly inequitable. Despite advances in knowledge and treatment, millions of people continue to experience unnecessary suffering due to pain that is ignored or poorly addressed.
The event brought together representatives from Member States, members of WHO-convened working groups, civil society organizations, and academic intuitions. Co-sponsoring Member States included Panama, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Lebanon. Civil society organizations included the International Association for the Study of Pain, International Children’s Palliative Care Network (ICPCN), the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA), the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists, and St Jude Global Palliative Care, and among others.
Speakers emphasized that millions of people globally continue to experience serious health-related suffering due to untreated pain, while access effective pain management remains profoundly unequal. The event illustrated how pain extends far beyond any single specialty or programme and must be addressed across the health system, from prevention and treatment to rehabilitation and palliative care. Michael Falcone’s statement from Global Alliance of Partners for Pain Advocacy was particularly impactful, sharing his lived experiences with pain and showing how these perspectives are essential in the global health dialogue.
Speakers highlighted the need to integrate pain care within primary health care, cancer and noncommunicable disease services, rehabilitation, emergency and surgical care, healthy ageing, maternal and child health, mental health, and palliative care.
The event explored 3 key areas of Global Pain Care:
- Pain in Serious Illnesses and Palliative Care
- Neuropathic Pain in Leprosy
- Pain in Emergency Care and Humanitarian Crisis Settings
1. Pain in Serious Illnesses and Palliative Care
Professor Julia Downing discussed pain as a core component of palliative care delivery for both adults and children worldwide, while Dr Stephen Connor highlighted findings from the Global Atlas of Palliative Care about the lack of access to essential pain medicines for people with serious illnesses, such as cancer.
Dr Janaki Vidanapathirana (Sri Lanka) further illustrated the challenges countries face in strengthening pain care within national health systems, emphasizing the importance of developing care pathways which consider both community and primary care as well as the need for specialized care. Ensuring that healthcare providers know how to recognize and treat pain effectively is also a critical consideration for treating pain in palliative care.
Speakers stressed that untreated pain contributes not only to physical suffering, but also to caregiver burden, social isolation, psychological distress, and economic hardship. Particular concern was raised regarding inequities affecting children, older adults, and those living in humanitarian settings.
There was also emphasis on the importance of balanced policies that improve access to essential pain medicines, including morphine, while supporting safe prescribing, stewardship, and interdisciplinary care models.
2. Neuropathic Pain in Leprosy
The pain experienced by people with leprosy is a neglected global health issue, and IASP President Andrew Rice emphasized the importance of recognizing neuropathic pain (pain due to nerve damage) as a major contributor to suffering among people affected by leprosy and highlighted the need for integrated clinical and public health approaches. Pain in leprosy remains under-recognized despite its significant impact on quality of life, disability, and social participation and its high prevalence in people who have had leprosy, and the pain often persists after successful treatment.
Amar Timalsina shared his lived experience perspectives and describing pain as a neglected aspect of leprosy care, while Dr Vivek Lal discussed the need to move beyond leprosy treatment with multidrug therapy alone and address pain more systematically within leprosy programmes.
Discussions underscored the importance of reducing stigma, improving recognition of neuropathic pain, and strengthening workforce capacity to assess and manage pain appropriately.
The topic illustrated how pain care must extend beyond traditional disease-specific boundaries and be embedded more consistently across neglected tropical disease programmes and broader health systems.
3. Pain in Emergency Care and Crisis Settings
A third major theme focused on pain management in emergency care, conflict settings, and humanitarian crises. Mykhailo Radutskyi and Nadiya Segin from Ukraine highlighted the enormous challenges of delivering effective pain care during war, disasters, and other types of humanitarian emergencies, where health systems are often overwhelmed and access to medicines, equipment, and trained personnel may be severely disrupted. They described the complex pain challenges associated with war injuries, trauma care, rehabilitation, and long-term care for wounded veterans and civilians.
These discussions explored both the immediate clinical demands of acute pain management and the broader public health implications of prolonged conflict and chronic pain compounded by psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Participants emphasized that pain management is a fundamental component of quality emergency and trauma care and should not be viewed as optional or secondary.
The discussions reinforced the need for stronger integration of pain care into emergency care systems, humanitarian response planning, rehabilitation pathways, and long-term recovery services and highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and workforce training to support frontline providers working in highly resource-constrained and rapidly changing environments.
Conclusions and a Way Forward
Pain is a cross-cutting health challenge that affects people across the life course
The event highlighted that effective pain care cannot be advanced through isolated efforts or within the boundaries of a single specialty. Pain is a cross-cutting health challenge that affects people across the life course and intersects with palliative care, rehabilitation, emergency and trauma care, primary health care, mental health, cancer, noncommunicable diseases, and neglected tropical diseases.
Addressing the global challenges of pain care will require a coordinated global approach that aligns policy, advocacy, workforce development, research, and access to essential medicines. Only through collaboration will we be able to accelerate progress toward more equitable, people-centred health systems that can prevent and relieve unnecessary suffering wherever it occurs.
The side event concluded with a call to establish a Global Pain Coalition to strengthen coordinated advocacy efforts, expand training and capacity-building for primary care providers, and improve equitable access to essential pain medicines.
Watch recorded statements from the event here.
Author: Megan Doherty, Palliative Care Consultant, World Health Organization.