As the calendar turns over to a new year, it’s natural to take stock – of what was accomplished in the past year and of what’s planned for in the future.
A growing reputation for excellence
The Centre continues to grow into a nationally recognized best practice leader in palliative care. Our work and resources have been shared through a number of national and provincial reports and publications. Most recently, Health Canada notified us that they had selected our cultural adaptions for advance care planning project as a case study for successful projects funded by them.
A drive to online learning
COVID-19 continues to be a transformational challenge for everyone, and the Centre was no exception. Notably, it has highlighted the need to invest in developing digitalized resources to enable health care providers and community stakeholder organizations to have access to life-long learning. One way we are meeting this need is by transforming out palliative care competencies into online self-learning modules, and developing a three-part self-learning course for health care providers to help initiate culturally safe advance care planning conversations with their patients (leveraging our work from the multi-year cultural adaptations project, completed in 2021).
Overwhelmingly, the Centre’s success is grounded in solid relationships and partnerships. Your support, participation and feedback are essential for us to be able to create resources and opportunities that will meet your needs, and ultimately all British Columbians.
Another initiative from 2021 that I’d like to highlight is our growing ECHO program. Based on an “all teach, all learn” approach, ECHO Palliative Care sessions are online, case-based learning that creates peer-to-peer support and an environment of knowledge sharing. As the ECHO palliative care hub for BC, we have worked with sector partners to create ECHO sessions in high-demand topics such as pediatric palliative care and psychosocial support. All indications are that we’ve tapped into an unaddressed need – the number of participants in these sessions increases with each offering.
Here comes 2022!
Looking ahead, 2022 will be another busy year for the Centre.
A key focus is to increase the reach of our public resources to underserved populations. We are currently adapting (both linguistically and culturally) our advance care planning resources for BC’s Hindi-speaking communities, and the Farsi-speaking communities will follow.
Our investment in digitizing resources and learning opportunities for health care providers will continue.
A new area of focus for 2022 is grief and bereavement. Building on research already begun, we will host a provincial roundtable in spring 2022, with an eye to creating recommendations to address existing gaps in bereavement services in BC, and to improve the experience of the bereaved.
These are just the beginning! Stay tuned for updates on these projects, and other initiatives coming soon.
Here’s to a successful 2022!
Dr. Eman Hassan, Executive Director
