Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to come and speak today. I'd like to take a few minutes to point out why investing in good end-of-life care is not only timely but also the necessary and the right thing to do.
Last year the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association presented at this committee with one of our champion council partners, Mike Sangster, from Telus Communications. We continue to engage new and existing partners in dealing with the end of life in a more comprehensive and integrated manner.
I'd like to thank the government for supporting the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association and the Quality End-of-Life Care Coalition with a $3 million grant to work on hospice palliative care integration. We hope to have that up and running in December.
There's more that we need to do, and all parties and all members need to be involved in this issue. In fact, all Canadians are going to need to be involved in this issue to make a difference. We want to challenge you all to go and visit a hospice or palliative care program in your ridings in the next three to six months. I think it's profound and it's a really important thing for all of you to do.
More than 259,000 Canadians will die each year, and most die in old age. Of those, only a small proportion receives quality hospice palliative care.
Seniors make up the fastest growing age group in this country, and in 2003 an estimated 4.6 million Canadians were 65 years of age or older. Their deaths affect up to five family members. Over 1.25 million Canadians were caring for dying loved ones in that year. Yet, in Canada, only 16% to 30% of Canadians—depending on where they live—who die now have access to hospice palliative care services. It's profoundly low.
The need is urgent and our capacity to respond is limited at this point in time. We need to look at how we can ensure that all Canadians have access to hospice palliative care.
The Economist Intelligence Unit put out a report in July 2010 that ranked Canada ninth out of 40 countries in how it did with hospice palliative care. It was not a terrible showing, but we can do much better. One of the startling facts was that 25% of the costs of dying in the last year of one's life in Canada are actually out of the pockets of Canadian patients and families. We came in 27th out of 40 countries in that regard. We really need to look at that, as it raises the question of how 26 countries did better than Canada. I think we really need to start to look at that.
The Quality End-of-Life Care Coalition, a coalition of 35 national groups, put out a blueprint for action. We've given you copies of it. They made four recommendations that still stand today. It's a 10-year blueprint. We understand that this is something that we all have to engage in over the next 10 years.
Of the four big recommendations, one was to ensure that all Canadians have access to hospice, palliative and end-of-life care. High quality palliative and end-of-life care must be integral to the health-care system—and it isn't today. It is really very much an add-on situation and many Canadians are not being referred. We want to provide more support for family caregivers. We realize that some measures have been taken in the last little while around accommodating family caregivers, but we need to do much more.
Also, in our roster of ideas in the blueprint for action, one that I want to touch on today is revisiting the compassionate care benefit to assist Canadian families. It needs to be increased. It's only six weeks of paid coverage, or eight weeks' coverage, and it is at an EI-based level. If you don't qualify for EI, you don't qualify for it. So there are things that we need to do around that.
The third area is improving the quality and consistency of hospice palliative care, and looking at investing in research.
Then, the last area was encouraging Canadians to discuss end-of-life care. We have a new campaign called the Speak Up campaign. It's something that we need to encourage Canadians to engage in. It's one of those things that we often don't talk about with our loved ones.
So we feel that quality end-of-life palliative care is the right of every Canadian, yet not every Canadian has access to these services.
Tomorrow I'm presenting to the Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, which is examining the progress that we've made in implementing the 2004 health accord. This is an important step, and as the government starts conversations with provincial and territorial governments on a 2014 accord, or whatever that's going to look like, we stress that the provision of quality end-of-life care must be looked at across all settings, across all diseases, across all professions, and across all ages, and must be integrated into our future thinking. We don't have the time to delay
The Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association and its many partners look forward to working with the government and anticipates that actions that will be taken on many of these recommendations.