Thank you, Mr. Chair and to this committee, for this opportunity to speak with you today. I will be joined by Dr. José Pereira in sharing our remarks with you. I am the chief executive officer of Pallium Canada.
I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge that the land from which I am presenting, the city of Ottawa, is the traditional, unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
For over 20 years, Pallium Canada, a national non-profit organization that was established in Alberta and now has its head office in Ottawa, has been equipping frontline health care workers with the essential skills needed to provide palliative care to Canadians. The ability to provide a palliative care approach when and where it is needed is essential for all health human resources in a modern, agile and increasingly diverse workforce, yet most health care professionals receive little to no training in palliative care during their formal health education.
Pallium's flexible and adaptable interprofessional training solutions meet both the team and individual learning needs of all health care professionals, including physicians, nurses, social workers, personal support workers, paramedics and others. Pallium has developed training specifically targeted to health care leaders so that they have the knowledge necessary to support the success of the health care teams they lead.
Pallium's LEAP programs—LEAP is an acronym, by the way, for learning essential approaches to palliative care—have been proven to increase palliative care knowledge and skills and empower health care providers to make changes in their practice and improve the palliative care they provide to patients. The interprofessional design of LEAP courses also creates a common understanding and culture among health care teams and has been shown to increase job satisfaction and enjoyment.
As a national, evidence-based, accredited training program, LEAP supports health human resource labour mobility and responds to identified workforce mental health needs. This is something that was recently highlighted in Ontario's long-term care staffing study, which identifies the ability to provide palliative care as a key challenge for long-term care staff that negatively impacts their mental health and well-being.
This lack of palliative care skills among health human resources in Canada has too often led to unnecessary pain and suffering for Canadians and grief for the families and loved ones who can't access the palliative care they need. If the pandemic hasn't made a strong enough case for the need for better skills training in palliative care, then I'm not sure what will. Past calls to improve these essential skills have been too often ignored.
The good news is that solutions, such as LEAP programming, have already been paid for by Canadian taxpayers. There needs to be a commitment to spread and scale such solutions so that health human resources have the competencies and confidence to provide better palliative care to more Canadians.
Dr. Pereira.