THE LEVELS of palliative care available to patients in Cyprus are substandard, the National Bioethics Committee said yesterday.
The Committee called on the Health Ministry for an improvement in the standard of care focused on pain relief and improvement in quality of life afforded to people facing serious and sometimes terminal diseases.
“We believe that there should be a rigorous examination of the current structure and palliative care services, something that would identify the shortcomings and assist in the development of new services that would provide a sufficiently high standard of care to every patient that needs it,” a report from the Bioethics Committee said.
Speaking at a press conference marking the six year anniversary of the Cyprus National Bioethics Committee, Health Minister Christos Patsalides admitted that this was a problem in Cyprus, and while there were private units specialising in providing palliative care to patients suffering from serious and complex illnesses, there was a need to raise the level of such treatment in the public sector.
Patsalides congratulated the Committee on their work, saying that he recognised the important role that bioethics have to play in society.
“The Bioethics Committee has a significant part to play in modern research and the never-ending development of medicine. They are responsible for publicising very important opinions,” he said.
“In my capacity as a lawyer, it is obvious that while there are continuous advances in the field of medicine, any progress cannot be made without taking into account ethical and legal reservations,” he said.
President of the National Bioethics Committee Rena Vrachimi-Petridou said that there was a need for a general improvement in the field of bioethics in Cyprus.
“Further research and development in the subject of bioethics need to be undertaken in Cyprus and while we have to thank the Health Ministry for the support that they have been giving us in the last six years, we are calling upon them to give us further assistance so that we can develop even further,” she said.
Set up as a semi-governmental organisation (SGO) in 2002, the Committee’s mission is the constant monitoring, systematic analysis and evaluation of the issues and problems that relate to the scientific research, progress and implementation of the sciences of biotechnology, biology, medicine, genetics and pharmaceutics as well as to the human intervention on the biological procedure and the human genotype and the investigation of their moral, deontological, social, humanistic and legal dimensions.
The Committee has issued a number of research papers and opinions ranging from subjects such as the use of the preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) method, Medically Assisted Human Fertilisation and the use of Genetically Modified (GM) crops.
