Australia’s prison population is growing and growing older. This is placing an increasing burden on the provision of palliative care in prisons and yet  little is actually known about the actual requirements of palliative care services, how they are provided, and whether palliative care services in prison are equitable with services in the community.

This brief highlights the significant gap in national data about all elements of palliative care need and provision in prisons, and describes how data collection could be improved through collaboratively designing palliative care data collection strategies, identifying nationally consistent data and health indicators about palliative care in prisons, prioritising new data items about palliative care for collection, maximising use of existing and novel data sources, and providing support for knowledge translation through development of a framework.