The number of Canadians who are aging out and dying and having diseases and needing good end-of-life care is increasing. Just look around the table; there are a lot of people with gray hair in the room. I just happen to dye mine.
Therefore, we need to provide those services. CIHI, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, puts out a terrific little chart that shows how Canadians die. There are four trajectories. They are sudden death, disease, frailty, and organ failure. Organ failure means heart attack and Parkinson's and the long dementias and stuff.
We need to think about how Canadians die and what kinds of services they need. They don't all need the care of a specialist, palliative care by a full team, or intervention of the type needed by somebody who has cancer and drastic pain and symptoms at the end of their life. We need to look at what services and what kind of palliative approach Canadians need.
We've struggled with this issue in the last three or four years. If 65% of Canadians never see a palliative care specialist, how do we ensure them a better end-of-life experience in which their needs are met and they won't be showing up in hospitals? Right now $35,000 per year per patient in the last year of life is spent on unplanned hospitalizations because we don't do a very good job of supporting those people who are living in their communities and in their homes. We can do a much better job of that. We need to consider all that.
I think it's our responsibility to do a much better job with all that, particularly in light of physician-hastened death. We've said to our community that this is an opportunity. We see it in other jurisdictions, and other jurisdictions have said they have to do the best they can if they're going to offer hastened death. I think that we have to call ourselves on that. We're not talking about millions and millions of dollars for specialist care or palliative care programs, but about pushing out this primary-care approach. That means every physician and every nurse talks to patients and their families about their needs. It means that we have checklists and that we look at frailty indicators. We have 85-year-old patients coming into a doctor's office and nobody asks them any questions about how they are doing, whether they are isolated, whether they have enough food, or whether they have fallen. There are lots of things we can do and there are lots of ideas, including this national framework that we put out.
We're all in favour of doing a better job across the board. If a patient chooses physician-hastened death, so be it. We need to do a better job of not deferring and not delaying, on working together in these systems, and on not prolonging people in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are way too many senior citizens lying on hospital gurneys in corridors. We really need to do a better job.