Patient and Family Advisory Council with the Bruyère Research Institute

Patients and/or caregivers (unpaid caregivers) are needed to participate as members of a Patient and Family Advisory Council. This council will be an engaged as members of a research team working on a 3-year study that is focused on improving access to palliative home visits at the end-of-life.

Ideal Participants:

• Ontario-based individuals who have been designated as palliative by their healthcare team and either have or have not received home visits by a physician or nurse practitioner
• Ontario-based caregivers to individuals in the prior group

About the Study

Home visits – a service delivered by physicians and nurse practitioners outside of formal homecare services – have known benefits for patients, including increasing satisfaction with care and quality of life, as well as reducing hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths. There has been no formal evaluation of Ontario-based policies designed to increase palliative home visits. We need to better understand factors that prevent or facilitate palliative providers’ willingness to provide home visits and the level of financial investment needed to increase physician and nurse practitioner provision of home visits for people near the end of life. A better understanding of strategies to increase access to palliative home visits and gauging political readiness for these strategies are critical to improving the dying experience of Canadians. Our findings will provide evidence and a business case for the Ontario government outlining how palliative home visits can be scaled up.

About the Role

We are looking for members to advise the team and help with research activities such as reviewing objectives, helping to prioritize work to align it with their lived experience, review results and provide interpretation, engage in knowledge translation, and ensure that policies informed by our research consider patients’ and caregivers’ perspectives and caregiving burden. Our Patient and Family Advisory Council currently has three members, and we are seeking to add an additional 1-3 members.

Time commitment

Participation in 1-hour virtual meetings approximately 4 times per year. Responsibilities will include review of study deliverables and manuscripts, if interested.

Members will be compensated for their time at a rate of $25/hour, which is aligned with honorarium guidelines set out by the Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) Working Group.

To express interest or if interested in learning more, contact: Madeline McCoy at mmccoy@bruyere.org