Our impact

Pallium Canada is at the forefront of building professional and community capacity to improve the quality and accessibility of palliative care in Canada.

Impacting the delivery of palliative care across Canada

Through innovative education, strategic partnerships, and a commitment to building capacity within health systems, Pallium Canada empowers health care professionals to provide compassionate, high-quality care for patients and their families. Our work ensures that more Canadians have access to the palliative care they need, when and where they need it.

Building palliative care capacity across the health care system

Over the course of its history, Pallium Canada has undertaken a wide range of initiatives with diverse partners across Canada—we believe in a collaborative approach to building palliative care capacity to benefit all Canadians. It is through this spirit of collaboration where we can find innovative and flexible solutions that work for the unique needs of our partners as they work to build capacity and improve palliative care for patients and their families.

Our partners

Transforming frontline health care practice across Canada

With over two decades of experience and over 60,000 learners reached, Pallium Canada has become the largest palliative care education provider for health systems and health care organizations across Canada with broad experience and expertise working with partners to implement large-scale regional and provincial capacity-building initiatives.

Our Courses

Creating more supportive and compassionate communities

When it comes to palliative care, the health care system is only part of the equation. Pallium provides resources to community members to help create a wraparound effect to better support people in the community who may be experiencing serious illness, caregiving, death, or grieving.

Our resources

Impact stories

Building palliative care capacity in Ontario

Together with Ontario Health, Pallium Canada implemented a large-scale palliative care training initiative that brought much needed palliative care education to almost 3,000 health care professionals across Ontario.

In 2023-24, we transformed our approach and embraced innovation to rapidly roll out one of the largest single training initiatives in palliative care. We achieved this by:

leveraging our extensive experience to develop and implement a large-scale training plan, plan and ultimately deliver over 150 courses across five Ontario Health regions in less than six months.
developing and executing a new communications and registration strategy to meet the specific needs of this project, which supported learners and ensured all courses were filled, maximizing the reach and impact of the training.
coordinating and managing all course logistics, including securing facilitators, to ensure efficient course delivery, reaching nearly 3,000 health care professionals.
designing and managing a new backfill funding program to ensure health care professionals could participate in training without disrupting their regular duties.
through our partnership, Pallium and Ontario Health built new capacity to deliver palliative care across the province in a very short period of time.

Cancer Care Ontario’s INTEGRATE Project

There are many benefits to people receiving palliative care and having it initiated earlier. But, access to palliative care is a problem. Pallium worked closely with Cancer Care Ontario to implement an integrated care approach and
build palliative care capacity among primary level provider across Ontario.

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Paramedics providing palliative care at home

Paramedics play a vital role in providing palliative care, often responding to crises at home where patients require immediate support. Pallium Canada partnered with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to enhance paramedics’ capabilities in delivering palliative care at home through tailored training and strategic collaboration.

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Proven impact building capacity

Pallium’s LEAP courses have been proven to increase palliative care knowledge and skills, empowering health care providers to make changes in their practice and improve the palliative care provided to patients.

In a large study involving over 7,000 doctors, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists who completed LEAP courses, improvements were reported in early identification of patients needing palliative care, advance care planning and goals of care discussions, pain and symptom management, opioid use, and teamwork. Thousands of examples were provided of how learners have implemented the knowledge they acquired, directly benefiting patients, families and the health care system.

There is evidence for implementation of learning in everyday practice. At the end of each LEAP Course, learners are asked to commit to things they will change in their practice. 72.5% of reported commitments were implemented into practice 4-months post course.

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BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS)

Large distances and difficult travel circumstances made attending in-person training for paramedics in British Columbia difficult and unaffordable. Working with BCEHS, Pallium developed a fully online, self-learning version of LEAP Paramedic, customized to BC standards of practice and with online case studies contextualized to those same standards. Over 800 paramedics trained have been trained to date, with plans to reach over 4,000 BC paramedics. Work is currently underway to scale this up to remaining paramedics in the province.

Family Health Teams Providing Palliative Care

Recognizing the critical need for improved palliative care access at the primary-care level, Pallium Canada, in partnership with the Champlain Regional Palliative Consultation Team and the Ottawa and Bruyère Family Health Teams, led a transformative 5-year project to build palliative care capacity among family health teams.

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