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Changes needed to boost end of life care in Canada: doctors

Canada needs to broaden its approach to palliative care to provide support to patients with serious chronic illnesses, not just those with cancer, suggests a group of doctors who deal with end-of-life care.

August 22, 2016  By Sheryl Ubelacker


Writing in Monday’s edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the specialists suggest major changes are needed to improve access to palliative care, especially for patients with such conditions as end-stage heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD.

Canada is ranked 18th out of 80 countries worldwide by the Economist Intelligence Unit for provision of palliative care, even lagging behind Mongolia and Panama in strategies to develop and promote such services to patients, the authors write.

“We ought to be doing better and can be doing better,” co-author Dr. Graeme Rocker, a respirologist at Dalhousie University, said in an interview from Halifax. “And it wouldn’t take a seismic change for us to achieve a higher level.

“Our aim isn’t to be increasing our ranking, as it were, but it’s (about) providing adequate care to the patients who need it.”

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Rocker said studies show that two-thirds of the estimated 250,000 Canadians who die each year have illnesses other than cancer, yet most don’t have access to the same types of palliative support as do cancer patients. For instance, only 20 to 30 per cent of those referred to a hospital palliative-care unit have a non-cancer illness, research has found.

He and co-authors Drs. James Downar and Sean Morrison, palliative-care specialists at the University of Toronto and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, respectively, say all doctors should be trained in the provision of end-of-life care, in part because there’s a dearth of palliative-care physicians.

The Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians has fewer than 500 members across the country, far below the number of practitioners in such specialities as cardiology or oncology.

“There’s a tendency for all of us to manage patients with the standard treatment approaches and then when things start turning really bad, we might be asking our palliative-care colleagues to become involved and take over the management of the patient in the late stages,” explained Rocker.

“But we can’t rely on that for the future because there simply are not enough palliative-care specialists or palliative-care nurses who can provide that level of support for what will become an increasingly large number of elderly patients in Canada with chronic illness and multiple interacting symptoms.”

Not only must access to end-of-life care be expanded overall, but it also needs to be refocused so more services are offered to patients in their homes or in community-based hospices, rather than delivered primarily in acute-care hospitals.

Surveys have repeatedly shown that most Canadians want to die at home or in a hospice when the time comes, but too often a lack of community-based services means patients end their lives in a hospital bed.

“There are many places throughout Canada where there simply isn’t access to that kind of care at the end of life,” Rocker said.

“So what choice do patients and their families have if they can’t die at home?

“What other alternative is there, other than an acute-care facility, which is the last place really that patients want to go?”


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