World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2026: pain is the theme

World Hospice and Palliative Care Day falls on the second Saturday of October: in 2026, 10 October, the same day as World Mental Health Day. The Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance chose Pain Management: An Essential Part of Palliative Care as the theme.

The Alliance frames the choice around pain treated as a whole: physical, psychological, social and spiritual. It is an idea more than half a century old, and still the most useful way to think about the theme.

Total pain

The concept of total pain comes from Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. In serious illness, pain is rarely only physical: fear, loneliness, unfinished business and questions of meaning join in. The components interact, and treating one while leaving the others leaves the patient in pain.

For a team, the practical consequence is that "are you in pain?" is a necessary question and not a sufficient one.

The four components in practice

An assessment that only uses a numeric pain rating scale measures the first. The other three need other questions:

• Physical: how strong it is, where it hurts, what eases it and what makes it worse. This is the part scales capture.
• Psychological: fear of what is coming, anxiety, the sense of losing control.
• Social: family far away, isolation, the role the person no longer has at home.
• Spiritual: questions of meaning, what is left unsaid, saying goodbye.

No one answers all four alone. That is why palliative care is team work, and why this year's theme asks for pain to be seen as a whole.

Where non-pharmacological care fits, and where it does not

Controlling physical pain is pharmacological and belongs to the medical team. Nothing below replaces or changes it.

Non-pharmacological care sits alongside, and this is where a virtual reality session can help manage some moments:

• Predictable moments of pain, such as repositioning or dressing changes, where immersive distraction is one of the tools studied. The mechanism is in virtual reality for pain management.
• The social component: family who cannot be there. The family call lets someone far away see what the patient sees and talk to them. We wrote about it in video calls with the family.
• The biographical and spiritual component: going back to a place that matters. It is no accident that the most requested destination is Fátima.

What this is not: it is not analgesia, not symptom control, and is not presented as either. Whether it makes sense, and when, is decided by the team caring for the patient.

Published studies on virtual reality in palliative care are collected in studies: palliative care.

A short session that stops when the person wants

In palliative care time is short and known. The session can be done lying down, lasts as long as the person wants and ends when they ask. With someone who no longer communicates, the decision belongs to the team and the family: see a patient who no longer communicates: is a session worth it?.

Three questions for the team on the 10th

• At the last pain assessment, did we ask about the other three components, or only the physical one?
• What calms this person, and is it written somewhere the next shift will read?
• Is there someone in the family who wanted to be there and cannot?

In short

• 10 October 2026: the theme is pain management as an essential part of palliative care.
• Total pain has four components: physical, psychological, social and spiritual.
• Controlling physical pain is pharmacological and belongs to the medical team.
• Non-pharmacological care sits alongside: distraction in predictable moments, the family, the places that matter.
• The session stops when the person wants.

The RVer platform's base product is a Class I Medical Device registered in EUDAMED and with INFARMED (Portugal). Sessions are run by the institution's own professionals, complement existing care and do not replace assessment, treatment or clinical follow-up.