Thanks for that question.
I hadn't even considered the confusion between palliative care and assisted dying. We have confusion within the country just on competing definitions of palliative care.
This is tremendously important, because of course if we're talking about rights and we're in the process of defining what all Canadians have a right to in terms of assistance in hastening death and we also decide to say that palliative care needs to be in place, then we need to have a common definition of what palliative care is across this country.
Education is a big part of this. In our report, I think we identified it in a few places. I would defer to any medical professionals in the room who could correct me, but certainly the latest information is that these issues are still simply not a big enough part of the education and training of our medical professionals. For physicians, taking into account and learning how to meet people's palliative care needs is a very small part of their overall medical training.
There are some astounding figures in this report by the federal panel about the number of palliative care specialists in Canada. According to this, the situation is even more challenging than we have found. We need to train more people. We need to have more specialists in palliative care, but we also need to train people as members of teams to be more familiar with how to deal with palliative care needs as part of their specialty, whether they're a nurse, a psychotherapist, an oncologist, or whoever. That's part one.
Then, obviously, Canadians need to be better educated. There's a variety of ways in which we can do that, but one thing we need to do is get advance care planning dramatically increased in this country. In Canada, less than half of the people who die from cancer have an advance care plan.
Having an advance care plan is not just about under what circumstances you should be revived or resuscitated; it's about really looking forward at the potential progression of your disease and the types of choices that you and your family may face. I think it's our best insurance for people making clear and informed decisions and also then maximizing the quality of life they have for however much longer they're going to live.