Karin Fink, palliative care physician at the McGill University Health Center and the GMF-U/CLSC Parc-Extension and Justin Sanders, Associate Professor at the Department of Family Medicine and Kappy and Eric M. Flanders Chair of Palliative Care, are one of four winners of Réseau-1 Québec’s Project Awards on Innovation. Their project is titled Improving end-of-life care at home by hearing the voices of bereaved caregivers with participatory action research.
Réseau-1 Québec is a network on primary care knowledge, based on an infrastructure of member clinics attached to one of four Primary Care Practice-based Research Networks (PBRN or Réseau de recherche axée sur les pratiques de première ligne - RRAPPL) that cover the province of Quebec. As such, the project was developed with and benefits from support from McGill’s PBRN, led by Jeannie Haggerty and Laura MacLaren.
Project summary
Caring for a dying person at home poses physical and emotional challenges to caregivers. They frequently experience burnout, which increases the risk of unwanted hospitalization and makes dying at home impossible. Palliative home care teams support caregivers but do so with variable accessibility and quality. To improve these services, we plan to ask bereaved caregivers what palliative care support they found especially helpful, and then share these findings with palliative home care services. Our team of caregiver research partners, palliative home care clinicians, and researchers aims to improve end-of-life care for patients and their caregivers.
Congratulations Dr. Fink and Dr. Sanders!
To read the original release, visit: https://reseau1quebec.ca/annonce-des-laureat-e-s-de-lappel-a-projets-sur-les-innovations/