This is going to be a fun morning.
I think it's very important to point out that a lot of the crises we are experiencing right now in palliative care and palliative care provision are related a generalized lack of person power across the health care system, especially in home care. We need more nurses and we need more personal support workers in particular, but most importantly, we need to add to our labour pool in those areas without stealing from other areas. By simply throwing money at palliative care, stealing staff from hospitals or from long-term care, we're just going to move one crisis into another place, and we've done that a few times during the pandemic, so just be careful.
I think it's important to recognize that in a lot of the crisis, even before the pandemic, the lack of funding, the inadequate number of palliative care beds and the inadequate amount of palliative care home resources had a very important upstream effect on the health care system as a whole. Probably one in five or one in six patients admitted to a hospital were simply waiting to go to another facility, another bed that didn't exist. The result was a heavy contribution to overwhelming our acute care facilities.
The even sadder part is that the beds in all the places they were waiting to go are cheaper than the beds they were occupying in acute care. We just published a C.D. Howe report a year ago suggesting that if you just took the patients who were in the final 90 days of their life, and that's almost half of the patients who are at so-called alternative level of care, or ALC patients, in hospital and moved those people to the beds they were waiting for, you would save hundreds of millions of dollars a year while improving care for those patients and alleviating the health care crisis. The acute care crisis is predominantly an end-of-life care crisis, and that's what we really need to focus on right now.
I think I also want to highlight the importance of improving support and funding for palliative care research in this country. We have definitely had an increase in the previous couple of years. A large amount of funding was given to the pan-Canadian palliative care research collaborative and a large amount of funding was given to the palliative care institute in Alberta. These are great starts; please keep going, because we really do need to improve our ability to treat many types of suffering, and in particular existential suffering, which is very common. It is the number one factor in people requesting medical assistance in dying, and there is currently no proven therapy to address that type of suffering. It is very important. We have promising therapies; we just need some support to help do that research and start to advance our field.
Improving palliative care is a moral imperative for all Canadians, independent of medical assistance in dying. Only the tiniest minority of Canadians choose medical assistance in dying at the end of life, and 98% of those people receive or have access to palliative care. There are many people who don't have access to palliative care or don't get good palliative care. They're not getting MAID either. This really isn't about MAID; this is about improving end-of-life care for all Canadians.
Maybe I'll just say that I think there is probably an opportunity to answer questions, so I'll just bring my opening comments to a close with that.
Thank you.