“At Pallium Canada, we believe it is essential to equip health care professionals with the skills and knowledge to provide earlier, more effective and more compassionate palliative care. The Competency Framework is informing our continuous learning programming and content. As part of the Palliative Care ECHO Project, the Learning Journey App will make these competencies even more applicable. The App will allow busy health care workers to create a personalized learning plan to equip them with the skills and knowledge to provide better palliative care to more Canadians.”
Jeffrey Moat, Chief Executive Officer
PALLIUM CANADA
“At Pallium Canada, we believe it is essential to equip health care professionals with the skills and knowledge to provide earlier, more effective and more compassionate palliative care. The Competency Framework is informing our continuous learning programming and content. As part of the Palliative Care ECHO Project, the Learning Journey App will make these competencies even more applicable by allowing busy health care workers to create a personalized learning plan to equip them with the skills and knowledge to provide better palliative care to more Canadians.”
Jeffrey Moat, Chief Executive Officer
PALLIUM CANADA
Making the content even more accessible and seamless for busy health care workers
Palliative care is the responsibility of all health care professionals across all sectors. It starts as soon as a life-limiting illness is diagnosed—not in a person’s final days. Unfortunately, there is a lack of awareness and understanding of palliative care. For example, it isn’t only delivered in acute settings by a specialist. Jeffrey Moat, Chief Executive Officer of Pallium Canada, estimates that just 5% of health care professionals have the skills to support palliative care outside of specialist settings. Increasing this skill set across sectors and professions requires continuous learning rooted in the guidance, competencies and standards established in the Canadian Interdisciplinary Palliative Care Competency Framework (Competency Framework).
Pallium Canada’s Learning Essential Approaches to Palliative Care (LEAP) courses provide health care workers with the knowledge, attitudes and skills—all aligned with the Competency Framework—to deliver palliative care in a more timely and effective way to patients and families facing life-limiting illnesses. Before beginning a LEAP course, learners complete a self-assessment within the Competency Framework. From there, they are identified as a novice, intermediate or expert, and connected with the appropriate resources to bridge their knowledge gap. With a foundational knowledge of the Competency Framework, health care professionals are equipped with the skills to better manage difficult conversations with families and feel more confident caring for patients with a life-limiting illness.
To make the content of the Competency Framework even more accessible and seamless for busy health care workers, Pallium Canada is creating a Learning Journey App. By embedding the self-assessment tool from the Competency Framework into the App, health care workers can identify specific skills and knowledge that can be enhanced through various continuous learning opportunities such as webinars, courses and personalized learning programs.
Pallium Canada has experienced outstanding success with their tools to activate the Competency Framework. In 2021 alone, 7,982 learners engaged in a LEAP course and Pallium Canada hosted 313 learning sessions. Through evaluation of LEAP courses and their impact, Pallium Canada has seen a marked change in the knowledge, attitudes and comfort level of health care workers delivering palliative care.
Pallium Canada is a non-profit organization that equips health care professionals, organizations and communities with the skills and knowledge to provide earlier, more effective and more compassionate palliative care.
This project has been made possible through a financial contribution from Health Canada. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Health Canada.
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