Seed Funding Competition

Despite palliative care being key to the right to health, the World Health Organization estimates that only 14% of the 40 million people requiring palliative care each year receive it, thus highlighting a significant gap in equitable access. Often, due to lack or delay in obtaining provincial health coverage when arriving to Canada, refugees face significant challenges in accessing community palliative care services and therefore – compared to Canadian residents – are more likely to have aggressive medical interventions at the end of life.

The goal of this project is to identify and to explore the challenges refugees face when trying to access palliative care in the greater Hamilton area of Ontario. Through this, we hope to get a better understanding to what degree are refugees with palliative care needs able to access the palliative care services they require. We also hope to see if their health insurance status has an impact on access as well. This project will explore these questions by interviewing healthcare professionals in community health care centers who provide palliative care and refugee patients who have palliative care needs. We also hope to look at administrative data that will supplement the interviews to provide a more thorough understanding of our questions. This project ultimately hopes to add to understanding of the refugee experience in palliative care and begin the process of closing the inequitable gaps that exists for refugees accessing palliative care.