Thank you very much for that question and for your work in Vaughan in promoting the hospice.
That was my work prior to Pallium Canada. It's a significant engagement with the community to enable that to occur. Having that kind of support in the work that will be undertaken is also part of broader cost savings.
From a Pallium perspective, our work is to develop and to support dissemination of broad-based interprofessional education and to build community capacity in order to provide appropriate care so that the very early goals of care, advanced care planning, embracing of families, and appropriate diagnosis of illness…so that appropriate settings of care can be applied to individuals and their families.
From a federal perspective, the work that we've been able to engage in to this point is to disseminate and build a standardized, consistent framework of education and training across multiple sectors of care and interprofessionally so that everyone is on the same page with the same understanding of providing care. Our work is very much looking to scale this model up from the impact that we've had to this point.
The one example I will give is with the training of paramedics across Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and now in Alberta, and making that change of practice from a dispatch or transfer to a hospital setting to provide much more cost-effective care in the home, and then again have those families supported so that they have a place to call when they have a crisis. As well, if that paramedic organization is affiliated with a long-term care setting that has had the same training, first, those calls will be much fewer, and if they do occur, they're coming from the same place of understanding.