Palliative care-related medications
This chapter provides information related to palliative care-related prescriptions from Palliative Care Schedule under Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and Repatriation Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (RPBS) and the characteristics of people who received them over the period 2016–17 to 2024–25.
Note that the data presented on this page do not include all medications prescribed for palliative care purposes, due to data availability (see Box 1). Further information about how these prescriptions are identified through the PBS and RPBS is provided in the Data source.
The information in this chapter was last updated in May 2026.
The data presented in this chapter relate primarily to medications listed on the PBS Palliative Care Schedule (referred to as palliative care-related prescriptions). This does not capture all medications prescribed for palliative care purposes, as some palliative care medicines (for example, morphine) are prescribed from the General Schedule. Further, the PBS and RPBS data do not capture over the counter medicines, medicines supplied to public hospital inpatients, and private prescriptions.
Information is also presented on medications prescribed by palliative medicine specialists from all schedules and are therefore likely to include prescriptions prescribed for both palliative care and non-palliative care reasons.
See Data source for further information.
Key points
In 2024–25:
- there were 1.6 million palliative care-related prescriptions provided to 488,000 people, equating to 3.2 prescriptions per person
- 8 in 10 (80% or 1.2 million) palliative care-related prescriptions were for pain relief
- general practitioners prescribed 89% of palliative care-related prescriptions, with 4 in 5 (82%) of these being for pain relief.
Between 2016–17 and 2024–25, the average annual change in palliative care-related prescriptions was 7.0% (908,000 to 1.6 million). Meanwhile, the number of people dispensed palliative care-related prescriptions declined by -0.2% per year (495,000 to 488,000). Consistent with these patterns, the number of prescriptions per person increased from 1.8 to 3.2 over this period.