Planning for Palliative Care Week 2025 is well underway. This year, the campaign will take place from Sunday, 7 to Saturday, 13 September and the theme for the campaign is Palliative Care: Living for Today, Planning for Tomorrow.

Every year, we try to choose a theme that lends itself to sharing those core messages about the benefits of palliative care, under a strong broad theme. We hope that this will help you and your organisations when planning events and other activities to help to support this year’s campaign.

Palliative Care Week is a campaign dedicated to raising public awareness and increasing understanding of palliative care and its benefits. Its primary audience includes those who could benefit from palliative care, health and social care professionals, the wider public, and communities across the island of Ireland.

Why Palliative Care Week ?

• Misunderstanding about palliative care persists, meaning some people who could benefit are less willing to seek it, potentially missing out on improved quality of life
• It comes under the broad understanding of public health approaches to palliative care
• It is in line with key palliative care policies across the island of Ireland

This year, in order to inform the development of our campaign, we have reviewed the learnings from research about the public’s perceptions of palliative care and effective campaigning about palliative care, and lessons from other countries that hold similar campaigns. 

First, we reviewed research that showcases the public’s perceptions about palliative care and took this into consideration when designing our own campaign. Second, we reviewed research that looks at the effectiveness of palliative care campaigns and finally, we looked at practical examples of what other countries are doing in relation to raising awareness of palliative care. Read the full report here.

If you are planning to host an event during the week, want to receive promotional materials or want to learn more about how you can participate, get in touch: Paula Pinto Araya (ppinto@aiihpc.org).

Last year’s campaign was a great success. The theme, ‘You, Me and Palliative Care’, was chosen with the aim of reminding people about the different ways that palliative care can touch any of our lives, how it can affect all of us and how it can benefit us if and when we may need it.

Download the full report to read about the amazing efforts made across the island that made this campaign a success — generating a cumulative reach of over 19 million which shows tremendous growth (over 40% on 2023). The report provides an overview of the multiple strands of the campaign including political engagement, online resources, media and social media engagement, palliative care experience videos, promotional materials and events which were taken forward by a wide range of organisations.  

To learn about previous campaigns, you can read the reports below:

• Past Awareness Campaigns