Finance committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee, and many thanks for this opportunity to present on behalf of Pallium Canada. Pallium Canada is a non-profit organization that reaches across the country, and our goal is to improve capacity with respect to palliat

Finance committee  Absolutely, we see cost efficiencies. We see improvements in quality of care, at the same time saving costs. We're all well aware of the news in the past few days of the skyrocketing costs in health care systems, and we need to reduce those costs and we need to slow down those h

Health committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee. Thank you so much for this opportunity to present today. I think palliative and end-of-life care are very important to Canadians. Thank you very much. Today I'm here to speak on behalf of Pallium Canada an

Health committee  Thank you.

Health committee  Yes, absolutely.

Health committee  I've heard another question that I think is extremely important, and that is the one about the use of emergency rooms to address palliative care needs. I believe that within systems we can do a much better job further upstream of preventing those sort of visits by being proactive

Health committee  I really believe that we should harness whatever resources we have, and if it is everyone's business, then absolutely, a PSW or a paramedic can play a critical role in helping out. In fact, we're seeing this happening in Nova Scotia and P.E.I., where we went out and developed a L

Health committee  Sure. It is well known that in any health care system we need a strong primary level base, and then a secondary and a tertiary level of care. The tertiary is the highly specialized care that a much smaller proportion of the population requires. You see that in the care of patien

Health committee  I can spend the rest of the day providing examples of cases of a palliative care intervention saving someone from saying they wanted to end their life earlier. I worked for a few years in Switzerland, and one particular case comes to mind. A young man with advanced lung cancer c

Health committee  I think there are many barriers, but let's not forget as well the examples of excellence across the country where they are able to overcome those barriers. We are known across the world as innovators. The problem is that we innovate a lot of pilot projects, and we need to scale t

Health committee  As with any new program, some fantastic work was done, and there were also some failures. We need to learn from those failures. I'll give you an example of what I think was fantastic work. I happened to be co-chairing the education working group. There were five working groups

Health committee  I would strongly recommend that we re-establish a secretariat or office or framework—

Health committee  —building on the successes that we had earlier on—

Health committee  —but adding much more to that.

Health committee  Certainly. There are two or three. One of them relates to identifying the patients who need palliative care going forward and tracking them on a large scale across a whole region to see where they are going, what services they are using, and what the impact is of different models