Wilfred Laurier Symposium

The Wilfred Laurier pre-conference will take place on Tuesday, October 21st, 2025.

Who are we missing? An innovative way to recognize people who could benefit from a palliative approach to their care.

Here’s the problem….many individuals with serious illness and complex needs are often not recognized as needing a palliative approach to their care. These include older people, persons with dementia, persons with serious mental illness, individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and persons from linguistic minorities, among others. So, what can we do? How do we build in automated systems to help clinicians flag these individuals?

In this symposium, we’ll share an innovative way to use health care data that’s already being collected to flag individuals who could benefit from a palliative approach to their care. This new process uses existing clinical assessment data collected with interRAI assessments that are used in both home care and long-term care settings across Canada.

During this session, we will tackle these important questions:

What is an interRAI assessment?
How are these interRAI assessments used in home care and long-term care across Canada?
What is the process to flag individuals with serious and complex needs?
How might this new process actually work in real life?
What are the implications if this new process was implemented across Canada and more globally?

The symposium will involve sharing the exciting new research in this area, funded by Health Canada. We will also hear directly from individuals with lived experience to get their perspective on how this research fills an important gap in providing the best possible care to those who need it.

Registration opening soon!

Improving access and facilitating system change for palliative care among underserved populations

Principal Investigators: Drs. Lynn Martin, Dawn M. Guthrie, & John P. Hirdes