This week marks National Hospice Palliative Care Week in Canada and this year's theme highlights the importance of providing compassionate care to anyone facing a serious illness, regardless of age, stage of illness, or which treatments they receive. During this week, are raising awareness about how palliative can improve quality of life and support for people leaving with a serious illness and those closest to them.
Access to palliative care can help both patients and their families to cope during an extremely difficult time. By reducing or relieving symptoms; helping patients to make important decisions or providing grief support, palliative care is a holistic approach that can help to improve quality of life.
Health and social service professionals, community leaders, and volunteers can provide a palliative approach to care at any point in the illness journey for most people living with a serious illness. Everyone in Canada with serious illness, or approaching the end of life, deserve the best quality of care and support regardless of who they are, where they live or their ability to pay. This is why, the Government of Canada collaborated with provinces, territories, health care providers and partners, to develop a Framework on Palliative Care in Canada and implement the Action Plan on Palliative Care, which includes key commitments around raising awareness about palliative care and grief; improving palliative care skills and supports for health care providers and others; enhancing data and research; and improving access to culturally sensitive palliative care and access for vulnerable populations.
As part of those efforts, in March 2023, Health Canada launched a multi-year public education campaign to raise awareness of palliative care and grief for providers who are not palliative specialists. Phase II launched in October 2023 and broadened the audience to reach people living with a serious illness and their families. Additionally, we announced $2 million in funding over four years to Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) allowing them to collaborate with partner organizations such as the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer to improve the delivery of palliative care services so everyone can receive safe, timely, appropriate care in the place of their choosing.
The federal government continues to work closely with provinces, territories, people living with serious illness, caregivers, stakeholders, and communities to improve the quality and availability of palliative care for all people in Canada as well as home and community care and long-term care. The Government is investing $5.4 billion for tailored bilateral agreements with provinces and territories that focus on enabling people to age with dignity, closer to home.
This week, we encourage you to spread awareness of the importance of palliative care in Canada by using the hashtags #PalliativeCareIsForYou and #NHPCW on your social media channels. Together, we can all play a role to ensure everyone gets the care they need.
