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Bring Care Closer

CCS is partnering with community voices to address the regional and geographic gaps in access to hospice residence beds across Canada. 
  1. Home
  2. Get involved
  3. Advocacy
  4. What we are doing
  5. Palliative care
  6. Bring care closer
Palliative care focuses on the quality of life for anyone with a progressive, life-limiting illness. That can mean pain and symptom management, psychosocial, emotional and spiritual support and comfortable living conditions with the appropriate level of care – whether at home, in hospice residences, long-term care, hospital or in any other setting of choice.    

Hospice residences provide important care for people at the end of their life. They help offer the support, comfort and dignity that everyone deserves at the end of life. Best practices suggest that Canada should have 7 hospice beds per 100,000 people. However, a recent report by the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) revealed that Canada is falling far short of that target with an average of 3.97 hospice beds per 100,000 people. The report, titled Analyzing Hospice Palliative Care Across Canada: A report on federal, provincial, territorial and community actions, is the first-time data like this has been available since 2017.   

Simply put, there are too few hospice residence beds in Canada. To fix this, CCS is partnering with a handful of community groups in Ontario and Manitoba actively seeking to build local hospice residences. Community groups who, like us, want to bring hospice residences closer to home. Because to bring care closer, it takes all of us working together. It takes a society. 

To draw attention to this critical issue and support the community groups calling for change, CCS is placing billboards in communities starting in two provinces. The billboards showcase the extreme distance to the nearest hospice residence – a distance that can be reduced by building a local hospice. 

Communities highlighted in this campaign include:


It takes everyone working together to bring care closer and CCS is proud to work in partnership with local hospice organizations on this project.  

For a community to be a great place to live, we believe it needs to be able to care for someone at all stages of their healthcare journey - including hospice palliative care. Our campaign is charting a path forward for better care closer to where people are. This means calling on all levels of government to develop systems to better measure access to all forms of palliative care. It means increasing funding to build new hospice beds in rural, remote, underserved and northern communities. And it means removing barriers for communities to build, expand and/or operate new hospice residences faster.  

Help us make this a reality by sending a letter to your elected official in Ontario or Manitoba.
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