Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you. We definitely know of cases where patients have requested MAID because of lack of access to palliative care. This might well be because of language barriers, or it might be because of an inability to articulate what they would like. They're not necessarily health lite

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Right now we have no way of being able to measure the quality of palliative care services that our patients have access to. By having minimal standards across the board throughout our country, we can essentially hold health authorities accountable by using evidence-based informat

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you. We definitely need increased funding and resources in palliative care, but it needs to be separate and distinct from MAID. Currently, essentially all of us are competing for the same resources. As I mentioned before, we have palliative care nurses in many of our provi

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  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 a

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  When it comes to being able to figure out what we have and who is doing what in terms of palliative care, we don't have that information. We have no national standards to benchmark palliative care. These do not exist. We need to create these. We don't have that information at the

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  No. The data that Dr. Downar refers to and the data that Health Canada reports is the wrong kind of data. It doesn't lend itself to being able to make these sorts of conclusions. I mean, it's self-reporting. I have the form in front of me. Essentially, the form asks, “Did the p

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Completely: I think it doesn't make any sense for the same person to be doing both. We really definitely need to separate this. Not only is there a conflict of interest, but there is also conflict within our community: We're competing for the same resources. Health care nurses

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the state of palliative care as part of the statutory review of Canada’s current legislation on medical assistance in dying. I am a palliative care expert with formal training in the field of palliative medicine and the program direct