Our Partners

As a leader in palliative care education for health care professionals, Pallium is working to bridge the gap between research and practice by partnering with McMaster University’s Department of Family Medicine to form the Dr. Joshua Shadd — Pallium Canada Research Hub. The Hub is undertaking work to advance palliative care educational research and measure the impact of continuing professional development on the health care system. One of the key initiatives of the Research Hub is the development of a Canadian Palliative Care Atlas to map out existing strengths, areas of excellence, and gaps across regions and provinces with respect to palliative care service availability. The Atlas will showcase a graphical representation of the status of palliative care in Canada and serve to advance a systems-thinking approach to the Canadian health care system by identifying several benchmarks of excellence and leadership. The Atlas will be the first of its kind in Canada and will help to consolidate and analyze the delivery of palliative care across the country.

Pallium, in collaboration with the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), is providing access to essential education on palliative care for all health care professionals in response to this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Pallium and CMA believe it is more important than ever for frontline health care professionals and teams to be equipped with the knowledge, tools, and skills to provide a palliative care approach to patients and their families. Pallium and the CMA made 10 Learning Essential Approaches to Palliative Care (LEAP) modules available for free to all health care professionals for the first 6 months of the pandemic. Pallium and the CMA’s collaboration will support the on-going digitization of LEAP courses to expand access and reach of palliative care training in Canada for all health care professionals.

Over 10,000 health care professionals across Canada accessed Pallium’s free online palliative care modules and the COVID webinar series during the first 6 months of the pandemic—a testament to the need that exists for more training and support. Pallium Canada and the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation are collaborating on the Li Ka Shing Palliative Care Skills Development Project to build palliative care capacity among Canada’s frontline health care professionals via Pallium’s Learning Essential Approaches to Palliative Care (LEAP) courseware. This transformational gift from the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation will train frontline health care professionals in urban, rural and remote settings on the palliative care approach with the goal of providing timelier, more effective and compassionate palliative care to patients and their families.

Learn more about the Li Ka Shing and Pallium Canada partnership. 

In response to Employment and Social Development Canada’s launch of the Supportive Care Assistants program—implemented to meet the urgent staffing needs of long-term care homes—Pallium has entered an exciting partnership with Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan). In collaboration with CICan, Pallium has developed an online training course for the new role of supportive care assistants. This course ensures that supportive care assistants are successfully equipped with the awareness of the palliative care approach and to prepare them for their work placements in long-term care homes across the country. LEAP Supportive Care Assistant will launch later this year. Partner colleges who will be utilizing LEAP Supportive Care Assistant include Collège communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick and Fanshawe College, with more on their way.

Pallium is working with the BC Centre for Palliative Care (BCCPC) and Hospice Palliative Care Ontario (HPCO) to create an interactive evaluation website for Compassionate Community initiatives in Canada that will help them adopt a common approach to evaluate their work with a focus on implementation facilitators, barriers, and potential for scale and spread. The evaluation framework will help Compassionate Community champions across Canada to evaluate the effectiveness of their work, share learning and results, and engage in discussions to help translate knowledge into action.

Learn more about the Evaluation Framework.

With the need for palliative care rapidly growing in Canada—amplified by the current COVID-19 pandemic—Pallium is collaborating with Boehringer Ingelheim Canada on an initiative to address the health system gaps that exist by building capacity to improve the quality and accessibility of palliative care for Canadians. Called Bridging HOPE (Helping Others Through Palliative care Education), this initiative aims to better support the growing number of patients and their families facing a life-limiting or serious illness by increasing the number of front-line health care professionals trained on the palliative care approach, providing timelier, and more compassionate palliative care. A minimum of 500 physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists will receive training on Pallium’s Learning Essential Approaches to Palliative Care (LEAP), providing practical, inter-professional and evidence-based training and tools in the palliative care approach across multiple health care settings and specialty areas. The Bridging HOPE initiative is also providing timely information to health care professionals during the current pandemic by hosting a series of webinars focused on topics that are relevant to health care teams across Canada who are actively leading the response to COVID-19.

In 2020, Pallium worked with Bayshore HealthCare to develop a hybrid delivery model for LEAP that combined online palliative care modules with a one-day face-to-face session. Bayshore piloted the hybrid LEAP in fall 2020 with their teams. The hybrid delivery model provides a more flexible, accessible, and lower cost delivery model that maintains the interactive, in-depth learning of a LEAP Core course.

Take a LEAP Core (online) course.

Pallium has two successful partnerships in New Brunswick with the aim of building palliative care capacity across the province. Pallium is working with Medavie Health Services to train paramedics on the palliative care approach using LEAP Paramedic. The aim is two-fold—to both increase the number of paramedics who can provide a palliative care approach to patients in the home, and to create more LEAP paramedic facilitators who will continue to train their colleagues in the years to come. Pallium is also working with the Government of New Brunswick simultaneously to build LEAP facilitator capacity and capacity among frontline health care professionals, namely family physicians and nurses, on the palliative care approach to improve access to palliative care for all New Brunswickers now and into the future.