Costa del Sol town creates new palliative care service

Vélez-Málaga town hall on the eastern Costa del Sol has announced that it has launched a palliative home care service. The programme will provide up to 94 hours per month for patients in the advanced stages of illness and will ease the burden on family carers.

Palliative care in Spain is not always offered within the public health system, but often has to be channelled through charitable organisations like Cudeca in Malaga province. In Vélez-Málaga, they have decided to include it in the portfolio of services provided by the municipal company, Emvipsa, which is already responsible for home help.

The Programa Municipal de Ayuda a Domicilio en Cuidados Paliativos (municipal home care programme for palliative care) has been designed to provide a rapid, urgent and humane response to people with advanced illnesses and their families. The service will strengthen home care in situations where the administrative deadlines of the Ley de Dependencia (dependency law )are incompatible with the seriousness of the illness that patients are going through.

The programme was presented in Torre del Mar by the deputy mayor of Vélez-Málaga and councillor for Emvipsa, Jesús Pérez Atencia on Friday 16 January. He said in a statement that "the current dependency law does not always come into effect in time when we are talking about advanced stages of illness. In such cases, time is not on the side of either patients or their families and as a local authority we have a moral and social obligation to act".

The initiative establishes preferential and urgent access to the municipal home help service for people included in palliative care programmes or under the supervision of specialised healthcare teams, especially cancer patients and those with progressive and incurable diseases. The aim is to enable these people to remain in their own homes until the end of their lives, with continuous professional support, while at the same time alleviating the heavy physical and emotional burden on family carers.

The service is aimed at people registered in Vélez-Málaga who have a family environment that requires external support and who have initiated, or are simultaneously initiating, the application for recognition of dependency. The procedure is coordinated between healthcare teams and municipal social services: it is the health centre staff who detect the situation of need and issue the report for inclusion in palliative care, after which the family requests the service on a priority basis and an urgent assessment is activated on the basis of humanitarian and health emergency criteria.

In terms of the intensity of care, the programme guarantees a minimum of 45 hours per month, which can reach up to 94 hours, depending on the needs of each case, equating to the highest levels of home care recognised in the system. "This is a social policy that is accessible, sensitive and deeply humane, placing people at the centre of public action, especially in the most difficult moments of their lives," Pérez Atencia explained.

He went on to say that between 1 October 2025 and 15 January 2026, Emvipsa registered 683 new users, in addition to another 25 registrations corresponding to the plan agreed by Vélez-Málaga town hall. Pérez Atencia concluded that the service is "direct and essential assistance to residents in need".