Grant: Project Grant

Palliative care is defined as an approach to care that improves the quality of life of people with serious or life-limiting diseases, provides support to their families, and focuses on the assessment and management of physical symptoms and psychosocial and spiritual concerns. As life expectancy increases, more people are living longer with serious chronic conditions. Palliative care is increasingly needed in the health care system. In Canada, only about 1% of doctors specialize in palliative care, but any doctor (e.g. family physician, cardiologist, kidney specialist, lung specialist) can provide a basic level of this care (called the palliative approach). Across the system, we do not know how often palliative care is provided by doctors of different specialties. Some doctors may provide a palliative approach to their patients with life-limiting illness and some may not. There may be factors in the system that influence how much a palliative approach is provided. Doctors may provide this care to some types of patients but not others. This makes it difficult for professional organizations to know where to place their efforts for improvement. Governments have invested resources to support education of health care providers in the palliative approach and to organize systems better, but many people still do not receive needed palliative care early enough. More information on where further improvements can be made is needed to ensure good health system planning and education of the work force. This study will use population-level health system data to measure whether a palliative approach is used by different specialties of doctors. Once the data has been examined for patterns, we will interview health care professionals to help us understand the patterns in the data and to learn what could help with improvements. The results will be shared with professional organizations to tailor their approaches to education and quality improvement.