Despite national incentives and locally commissioned services designed to improve availability of palliative care medicines from community pharmacies, access is not evenly distributed across the country.

This problem is only set to get worse with demand for these services expected to increase in the coming decades. Marie Curie has estimated that, if the proportion of people requiring palliative care remains the same, the number of people with palliative care needs in the UK would increase by more than 147,000 between 2023 and 2048 — a rise of 25%.

In this episode of The PJ Pod, executive editor Carolyn Wickware and senior features editor Dawn Connelly discuss what the NHS is doing at local and national levels to ensure patients can maintain their quality of life for as long as possible.