In partnership with Pallium Canada, BC Centre for Palliative Care (BCCPC) is the provincial hub in BC of the Palliative Care ECHO Project. The federally funded five-year initiative aims to cultivate communities of practice and establish continuous professional development among health care providers who care for patients with life-limiting illness.
Home (page) renovation
For all the information about the BC Hub of the Palliative Care ECHO project, you’re invited to spend some time on our updated and expanded website. You can now see past ECHO topics and content, and it’s even easier sign up for coming sessions. And stay tuned: more improvements are coming! Over the coming weeks, we will include additional information on how you can pitch ideas for themes or content suggestions for future sessions, as well as information on how you can co-create a series with us. (More about that below).
What is the Palliative Care ECHO Project?
ECHO Benefits: Increase your knowledge, competency, skills and network
No single service provider can know it all … that’s why there is ECHO! ECHO creates a knowledge-sharing network of healthcare providers, subject matter, and community experts to share experience and learning. This simple approach is designed to ensure that the right knowledge is in the right place at the right time, and it has been globally recognized as a successful intervention to improve patient care outcomes.
ECHO has been shown to:
• Create a sense of community with geographically distant professionals
• Increase knowledge, competence and skills
• Enhance working relationships and workplace culture
• Enhance person-centred end-of-life care practices
• Increase capacity for collaborative research
Knowledge moves, not people
Because ECHO is a virtual community, location is taken out of the equation, so it’s just as effective in rural and remote communities as it is in metropolitan centres. With an ECHO network, practicing in an isolated community doesn’t mean you are professionally isolated.
The ECHO model cultivates a continuous loop of learning, mentoring and peer support. As a virtual format, it can reach beyond geographic limitations into every corner of the province, with big or small organizations, connecting people with knowledge, experience, and expertise.
Creating an ECHO
Ultimately, ECHO is about you. It’s up to you to decide what the focus will be, and what form it will take.
Your ECHO can focus on:
• Subject (e.g., patient population or condition)
• Discipline (e.g., pharmacists, family physicians, community support workers)
• Geographic (e.g. a specific region in the province)
And the form of your ECHO can be flexible to fit the subject or the participants:
• ECHO Session (singular or one-off events)
• ECHO Series (sessions that are linked together by common theme or audience)
• ECHO Program (a collection of activities that are meant to work towards a main learning objective or goal)
As the ECHO hub for the province, BCCPC will work with our partners to co-create the ECHO providing support and experience with the ECHO model.
Want to learn more or have an idea for an ECHO session or series? Email your ideas or thoughts to the ECHO team: Echo@bc-cpc.ca.
