Preparing Paramedics: Palliative Care - Cheryl Cameron Tyne Lunn

Critical Levels

Paramedics receive little education on grief and bereavement. As paramedicine integrates palliative approaches to care, it has become very apparent paramedics are under-prepared for the crucial role they play in supporting patients and families in grief and recognizing and responding to their own grief reactions.

In this episode we talk to Cheryl Cameron and Tyne Lunn about how paramedicine is evolving to include the provision of palliative care. We start by defining palliative care and talk about how paramedics are well positioned to support patients with palliative care needs, already seeing this patient population in our routine 911 caseload, but needs to do better to align the care we provide with people’s wishes.

· MyGriefToolbox as one strategy and tool to address gaps in education/supports for paramedics

· Scale and spread of this approach across Canada

· Importance of person, family and caregiver centered approach

· Psychosocial support, system navigation, and compassion can be provided by all levels of paramedics

· De-bunking some myths about providing palliative care

They’ll introduce us to MyGriefToolbox, a set of free resources that have been developed in collaboration with Canadian Virtual Hospice to support paramedics as we provide a palliative care approach and psychosocial support to grieving individuals, families, and caregivers.