Thank you.
Primary palliative care providers are doctors such as family doctors who have training in basic palliative care skills and provide a palliative approach to care to their patients, but some patients have more complex needs and require specialist palliative care teams and specialist palliative care doctors like me, who have more advanced training.
Primary palliative care providers are the backbone of palliative care in this country, and we need to support them. We need to ensure that our undergraduate and postgraduate competencies are adopted by all Canadian medical schools and their residency programs so that all doctors who graduate have the basic skills to provide palliative care, but we don't have enough specialist palliative care physicians in our country either. We urgently need to make sure that we fund more residents to complete the advanced training—like me—and we need to ensure that all of the competencies that we have created are integrated into all of our programs.
In addition to that, the quality that you mentioned—