Seed Funding Competition

Providing growth and development opportunities to the next generation of investigators in palliative care.

Applications for the 2025 Seed Funding Competition are open from December 2nd, 2024, 12:00 am ET to January 24th, 2025, 11:59 pm ET. 

Two people looking at tablet together

Our competition is designed to support early-career investigators and trainees who are faced with a highly competitive and challenging funding environment.

Applications for the 2025 competition open on December 2nd, 2024.

Funding pilot and synthesis projects across Canada.

We support pilot and synthesis projects that are typically not funded by traditional larger granting agencies but need to be completed to provide the necessary groundwork and results to facilitate larger studies and funding applications.

Pilot or synthesis projects can be described as:
• Small pilot/feasibility trials
• Scoping/systematic reviews
• Data standardization/harmonization initiatives
• Descriptive health administrative studies

Supporting equitable palliative care research.

We prioritize funding for high priority populations where gaps in palliative care research and service delivery exist. Primary priority will be given to projects that directly respond to palliative care research and practice gaps for at least one of the following priority populations:

• Sex/gender/LGBTQ2-Spirit+
• Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC)
• Indigenous peoples
• Immigrants
• Minority linguistic groups
• Homeless/vulnerably housed
• Pediatric patients

2024 Awardees

This year we awarded two one-year-long grants of $20,000. Here are the abstracts from our winners.

Improving end-of-life care at home by hearing the voices of bereaved caregivers with community participatory research

Dr. Karin Fink
McGill University, Department of Family Medicine

Caregiving for someone at home at the end of life can be difficult. Sometimes, caregivers are so burnt out that they cannot continue their role. Palliative home care teams help caregivers in caring for people at home who are close to the end of life by giving physical support, lending equipment, and relieving pain or other symptoms. Unfortunately, not all palliative home care teams offer the same services. This means that some caregivers do not get all the support they need. Our research goal is to understand how to better support caregivers when they must care for somebody at the end of life at home. We decided to include caregivers in the entire research process. By finding out what support works for caregivers and how to achieve more of it, caregivers will help design the healthcare services most useful to them.

Patients and Caregivers
Members