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Seed Funding Competition
Providing growth and development opportunities to the next generation of investigators in palliative care.
Download the Application Guide.

Providing growth and development opportunities to the next generation of investigators in palliative care.
Applications open now!
This year we awarded three one-year-long grants of $20,000. Here are the abstracts from our winners.
Adolescents and Young Adults (AYA), aged 15-39 years old in North America, represent approximately 7600 patients of the annual Canadian cancer population. Similarly, AYA patients with HIV, another life-threatening disease, have 30 times higher mortality rates than the general population of the same age. AYA patients face different psychosocial, medical and supportive care challenges during their illness trajectory. Palliative care is a medical specialty that aims to improve the quality of life of patients with life limiting illnesses and their families, by providing physical and psychosocial support. Despite its proven benefits, establishing AYA-specific palliative care services is limited. Moreover, there is resistance to early palliative care referrals.
This study will describe the referral patterns of AYA patients to palliative care, and define the factors associated with the incidence and timing of these referrals. Studying the referral patterns will help define the optimal time for palliative care referral, which will improve the treatment outcomes at end of life. Also, understanding who the referral teams are and classifying them as to their referral frequency will help allocate more focus to promote adequately timed palliative care referrals from the low and intermediate referring services.
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.
The limited evidence describing the quality of Chinese patients’ care during serious illness reveals significant inequities. Although healthcare disparities are evident for all racial and ethnic minorities, most efforts to understand and alleviate these disparities have focused on indigenous, Black and Hispanic communities. As a result, there remains a paucity of literature aimed at understanding and alleviating health inequities among Chinese and Asian adults with serious illness in North America. Palliative care may be uniquely positioned to address these health disparities, because it aims to provide “active holistic care of individuals across all ages with serious health-related suffering due to severe illness and especially of those near the end-of-life.” While growing research points to the benefit of palliative care during serious illness, including improved quality of life, care satisfaction, and care outcomes, the role among marginalized, minoritized, and racialized communities are unknown.
The overall purpose of this research plan is to better understand the perceived role and lived experiences of palliative care among Chinese patients through a combination of recorded naturally-occurring conversations and in-depth interviews. The generated data will be used to develop a culturally-tailored communication intervention to improve seriously ill Chinese patients’ and their caregivers’ engagement and satisfaction with palliative care.
This project has been funded by a contribution from Health Canada, Health Care Policy and Strategies Program. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Health Canada.
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