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 now closed.

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

2025 Awardees

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

Development of a home-based palliative care simulation learning exercise for an equity-deserving rural community

Dr. Kelly Fenn

Brightshores Health System

Building capacity to deliver a palliative approach to care is vital to health system transformation. The demand for palliative care (PC) is increasing, and early integration of PC is needed. Patients want care at home by health care providers (HCP) that will work collaboratively to meet their needs.

Delivering high-quality PC requires competencies that many HCP lack, particularly when working alone to provide home visits in the community setting.

This study develops a PC simulation learning exercise for community-based HCP in a rural, under-resourced region. HCP will gain confidence in symptom management, addressing goals of care, and collaborating within a resource-limited context. Interprofessional simulations will mirror real-world challenges, fostering transformative learning, teamwork, and problem-solving. This initiative seeks to build a lasting scaffold for interprofessional learning, collaboration, and improved care for patients and families across the palliative trajectory.

The association between patient language and receipt of physician-delivered palliative care at the end of life in people on maintenance dialysis

Dr. Michael Bonares

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Nearly 20% of Ontarians on maintenance dialysis are recent immigrants. Our population-level study found that recent immigrants are less likely than long-standing residents to receive physician-delivered palliative care in the last year of life. This may be due to language discordance between patients and their kidney care providers, as most recent immigrants come from regions where English is not the primary language. Receiving care in a non-primary language is associated with poorer health outcomes. However, it is unknown whether this affects use of palliative care at end of life in people on maintenance dialysis. Using population-level healthcare administrative databases, we will examine whether having a non-English primary language is associated with lower rates of physician-delivered palliative care in this population. Our findings could motivate efforts to provide language-concordant care and serve as the foundation for research aimed at improving palliative care access for marginalized linguistic communities.

Improving Advance Care Planning for Adolescents and Young Adults Diagnosed with Cancer: Pan-Canadian Development of Voicing My CHOiCES– Canada

Dr. Perri Tutelman

University of Calgary

In Canada, over 9,000 adolescents and young adults (AYAs; ages 15-39 years) are diagnosed with cancer each year. For young people with advanced cancer, talking about their end-of-life (EoL) preferences is important, but many don’t get the opportunity to share their wishes. Improving EoL for AYAs in Canada is an important priority for research identified by patients, caregivers, and clinicians. Voicing My CHOiCES (VMC) is an advance care planning tool that was created to help guide conversations about EoL care for young people and has shown to improve their experiences. However, there are unique aspects to the Canadian healthcare system that are not covered in the current VMC tool and so a Canadian version is needed. This study will assess how appropriate and helpful VMC is for Canadian AYAs and identify any changes needed to make it more relevant. This research is the first step in a larger program of research to focus on improving care for young people with advanced cancer in Canada.

Seed Funding Competition

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.

Supporting equitable palliative care research.

2025 Awardees

Development of a home-based palliative care simulation learning exercise for an equity-deserving rural community

Dr. Kelly Fenn

Brightshores Health System

The association between patient language and receipt of physician-delivered palliative care at the end of life in people on maintenance dialysis

Dr. Michael Bonares

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Improving Advance Care Planning for Adolescents and Young Adults Diagnosed with Cancer: Pan-Canadian Development of Voicing My CHOiCES– Canada

Dr. Perri Tutelman

University of Calgary

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