Improving access to palliative care starts with better data collection

During National Hospice Palliative Care Week this week, the federal government owes it to people across Canada to ensure that they have access to palliative care throughout their disease process, as well as at the end of life to allow them to live their lives fully, free of pain, in the setting of their choice.

Why do we have so much trouble tracking palliative care services across the country? Mainly because there is no common Canadian definition for palliative care, and no agreed upon common data sets to track services across the country, write the authors.Photograph courtesy of Pixabay

Opinion

BY CARRIE THIBODEAU, BIANCA CARLONE, DANIEL NOWOSELSKI

May 11, 2023

Fifty eight percent. That’s the number of Canadians who received palliative care before the end of their lives in 2021-2022, according to a new Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) study titled Access to Palliative Care in Canada. While there is some g...

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