Palliative Care

Sky Works and the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care at Mount Sinai hospital are joining together to produce a documentary for caregivers who have a loved one in palliative care.

From the moment of diagnosis, patients and their family caregivers experience confusion, roadblocks and painful frustration as they try to access institutional and community care. This documentary will look at the trials and triumphs of patients and their caregivers who want to live with an end of life illness. The challenge is not only to die with dignity; it is to live with dying.

This will not be a film about despair, but a forum for caregivers to share experiences, coping mechanisms, communication strategies and to create a community for people who are struggling to access support and care.

The issues explored will be following:

• Misconceptions among patients, families, health care professionals and the general public around palliative care abound. We think of palliative care for the end of one’s life - to manage a pain-reduced and grief-coping death of a loved one only in the last stages of dying. In reality, palliative care is an inter-and multidisciplinary approach to managing the final years to the final days of a family facing the reality of a terminal illness. Palliative care is a holistic approach that can work in concert with other approaches and active disease treatments.
• There are limited home care resources and palliative care program resources across Canada. When one is diagnosed with a terminal illness, particular treatments are ineffective, others may not be covered by government or private insurers, and treatment options are diminished. How do patients, families and clinicians decide to shift treatment plans from the curative model to palliative options? What do the time designations related to prognosis of 3 month, 6 month or 18 months mean to the professionals who offer these predictions, to the patients, care givers and families who seek out that information? How do these predictions affect treatment plans, access to services, and quality of life issues?
• When the number of technical interventions is dramatically reduced in a medical environment that relies so heavily on technology, what kind of care emerges? Although palliative care may include technological interventions, the goal of these treatments is comfort rather than cure.
• Communication among and between the range of institutions, agencies and professionals and the care givers, patients and family is a constant struggle. The discomfort about talking about dying and death limits the exploration of service options available to patients and families at the end of life.
• We are in the early stages of the project, from both content and funding perspectives. We are actively seeking advisors and funding partners to work with us as we develop this documentary project. Research will be underway in December and production will begin as funding is secured.