International Pain Policy Fellowship

Grantee List

The International Pain Policy Fellowship seeks to provide candidates with the knowledge and skills necessary to develop and implement a project to evaluate national policy and improve the availability of pain medications for pain relief and palliative care in their respective countries.

The fellowship is funded by the International Palliative Care Initiative of the OSI Public Health Program and directed by David E. Joranson and Karen Ryan, Pain & Policy Studies Group, University of Wisconsin Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center, Madison.

Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life of patients and their families by relieving pain, but cannot be effective without access to opioid analgesics. Because opioid analgesics also have a potential for misuse, they are controlled by international treaties and national drug control policies. Many drug regulatory policies are excessively strict and have become outdated as the science of pain has evolved and as chronic diseases have increased. Consequently, more and more patients, especially in the developing world, lack access to the opioid analgesics that the World Health Organization has designated as essential medicines. A fellowship with some of the world’s experts in opioid availability can empower already-motivated health professionals to evaluate and help improve the regulatory environment in their country.

The fellowship is intended for health professionals (for example, oncologists, AIDS clinicians, pharmacists, pain and palliative care physicians), health care administrators, policy experts, social workers, or lawyers from low- or middle-income countries who have an interest in drug policy advocacy to improve availability of opioid analgesics for pain relief and palliative care.