We actually presented a number of times to the parliamentary committee on palliative and compassionate care, and we're actually quite pleased that I think there's a consistency of messaging across the country, possibly because we gave the four recommendations to everybody who would listen to us and said to be consistent and whatnot.
I realize that the recommendations in the brief are slightly different from the blueprint. You're referring to the $16 million in research dollars and the capacity-building fund. We made the same recommendations last year, so I'll speak to them very briefly.
There was a $16.5 million research fund in palliative and end-of-life care that lapsed about two years ago. There are no concerted research dollars for palliative and end-of-life care at this point in time. There is research being done, but there is certainly not a research fund. We hit the tip of the iceberg in some of those research areas. It's less about the biomedical and more about patient-centred care. We need to know more about that, so we recommended that again this year.
The other piece was on establishing an end-of-life care capacity-building fund of $20 million annually for a period of five years. This is the dialogue we're talking about that engages health care providers in the planning community and industry, legal groups, and governments at various levels in how we're going to figure this one out. Part of it is about health care, but more and more it's about socio-economic issues, right? It's about poverty. It's about housing. It's about nutrition. Twenty percent of people living in long-term care facilities in Canada are actually there because they can't afford an apartment. They actually don't need long-term care. We need to really start to look at that, because we're going to need those beds, and we need to do the right thing by Canadians. I think we need to look at how well we're going to do this and have a dialogue.
