More than a webinar, CHPCA’s virtual conference Learning Institute is designed to offer more than passive online learning. Each live session combines expert-led education with practical learning, discussion, and opportunities to connect with colleagues working in hospice palliative care across the country.
Explore What’s Ahead in October
October brings four engaging Learning Institute virtual sessions designed to expand your knowledge, spark new ideas, and strengthen your practice in hospice palliative care. From exploring equity in advance care planning, strengthen culturally sensitive communication, better support grieving children, or engage with the ethical complexities of MAiD; each of our October session offers an opportunity to learn from experienced leaders and connect with others across the sector.
Whether you’re looking to deepen your understanding, explore a new area of practice, or simply be inspired by fresh ideas, there’s something to discover this October. Join us for one session or take part in all four!
Thanksgiving Special: For a limited time, you can join ANY Fall Learning Institute session for just $95, that’s $50 off the regular $145 registration fee! Register by midnight on Thanksgiving Monday, October 12. Use promo code THANKSGIVING at checkout on any session registration page.
*Members please email conference@chpca.ca for your code to receive $50 off your member registration price.
October Sessions
October 6, 11:30am-3:00pm (Eastern)
ACP in Canada: Historical Barriers and Paths Forward for Marginalized Communities
Facilitated by: Professor Phelim Boyle
Most Canadians will face a moment when they can no longer make their wishes known—and without a plan, someone else will make that choice for them. Advance Care Planning (ACP) is how you make that plan. At the centre of ACP is the Substitute Decision Maker (SDM), the person who speaks for you when you no longer can. The SDM framework was built for someone with a stable family, cultural alignment with mainstream medicine, and the means to plan ahead. This session looks at the communities often ignored by the current system including Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, the homeless, the incarcerated and LGBTQ+.
- By the end of this session participants will be able to:
- Explain what ACP is in Canada, what an SDM does, and why the rules differ by province.
- Explain the tension between Article 12 of the CRPD and most provincial laws governing substitute decision-making.
- Trace the historical traumas behind each community’s distrust of the healthcare system—from residential schools to eugenics laws to criminalization.
- Name the specific barriers each community faces—and explain why a system built for the majority fails those at the margins.
- Explain why letting someone else decide—rather than supporting a person to decide for themselves—is both a rights failure and a care failure.
- Point to solutions that are already working—Journey Home Hospice, land-based care, chosen-family recognition—and say what makes them work.
- Draw on what Ireland, Scotland, and Australia have done and bring those lessons home to Canada.
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October 13th, from 1:00pm – 4:30pm (Eastern)
Providing Culturally Sensitive Care for the Chinese Community and Beyond
Facilitated by: Dr. Kelvin Lou, M.D
Serious illness conversations can become particularly challenging when cultural values shape how illness, decision-making, and communication are approached. This Learning Institute session focuses on improving how clinicians provide palliative care for patients and families from Chinese cultural backgrounds, particularly during high-stakes conversations around prognosis and goals of care.
It will outline an approach to common real-world challenges, including requests to pursue all possible treatments, hesitancy around direct discussions of prognosis, and family-centered decision-making. These situations are often perceived as barriers to care, but are reframed here as expressions of cultural values such as filial responsibility, protecting loved ones, and preserving family harmony. Participants will develop skills in using indirect communication strategies to approach sensitive or taboo topics such as prognosis and end-of-life care while maintaining trust and relational harmony. Through real clinical cases, participants will apply these approaches to common challenges, including communication breakdown, responses to perceived denial, and requests for interventions such as artificial hydration and nutrition at end of life. The workshop will also address how to navigate complex family dynamics with multiple stakeholders, and how to move conversations forward when they become stalled or conflicted.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Describe how cultural values, including filial piety and family harmony, influence goals of care discussions and healthcare decision-making in Chinese patient populations.
- Demonstrate the use of indirect communication strategies to discuss sensitive topics such as prognosis and end-of-life care while maintaining trust and relational alignment.
- Apply structured communication frameworks to facilitate trust-building, support emotional safety, and guide shared decision-making in serious illness conversations.
- Analyze and manage common communication challenges, including perceived denial, requests for life-prolonging interventions, and complex family dynamics, using case-based approaches to achieve alignment and reduce conflict.
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October 21st, 2026, from 1:00 pm – 4:30 pm (Eastern)
Jumping Through Puddles: Supporting Children and Families Through Serious Illness, Death, and Grief
Facilitated by: Laura Jin, MSc, CCLS
How do we talk to children about death? What do they actually understand, and what support do they need? In other words, why is it important for us to consider the needs of children when a parent, grandparent, or other significant person is dying?
This interactive Learning Institute session invites participants to explore these questions through the lens of a child life specialist working in palliative, hospice, and bereavement care. Participants will examine how children and youth understand illness, dying, and death across different developmental stages, and how these understandings shape their emotional and behavioural responses.
By the end of this session, participants will:
- Understand how children and adolescents understand illness, dying, and death across key developmental stages.
- Recognize common challenges and barriers in supporting grieving children and families, and gain strategies to address these within their professional role.
- Identify practical strategies that support children’s coping, emotional expression, and meaning-making during anticipatory grief and bereavement.
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October 28th, from 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm (Eastern)
Facilitated by: Kevin Andrew Heslop
As Canada’s legislative framework for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) continues to evolve, the discourse often remains bifurcated between clinical-legal protocols and polarized public debate. This CHPCA Learning Institute session explores the necessity of a “dialogic” approach to bioethics—one that moves beyond administrative checklists to engage with the profound moral, social, and spiritual tensions inherent in end-of-life care. this presentation utilizes the format of the “philosophical dialogue” as a research methodology. By curating a community of voices—including medical practitioners, leaders of faith, relatives, and disability rights advocates—this work creates a discursive space where conflicting perspectives are not merely acknowledged but are placed in active, constructive tension. This method prioritizes the “humanities-first” approach to healthcare, centering parallax as a primary source of ethical knowledge.
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
- Identify, Analyze, and Articulate Divergent Perspectives: Participants will be able to identify at least three distinct ethical viewpoints—ranging from clinical practitioners to disability rights advocates—regarding the expansion of MAiD, enabling a more holistic understanding of the “community of voices” involved in end-of-life care.
- Apply Dialogic and Contextualizing Communication Techniques: Participants will be able to demonstrate two specific “dialogic” communication strategies (such as active listening across moral differences, the coincidence of opposing axioms, and open-ended inquiry) to facilitate more nuanced and empathetic conversations with patients and families navigating MAiD requests.
- Evaluate Ethical Imperceptibles in Practice: Participants will be able to evaluate existing clinical protocols to identify potential “unknown-knowns” where systemic inequities or marginalized perspectives may be overlooked during the MAiD assessment process.
- Integrate Medical Humanities into Care: Participants will be able to describe how incorporating literary and philosophical inquiry (the “medical humanities” approach) can reduce moral distress among healthcare providers by providing a framework to process the complex emotional and ethical tensions of end-of-life decision-making.
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Make October Part of Your Learning Journey
With four sessions covering equity, culture, communication, grief, ethics and end-of-life care, October offers plenty of opportunities to learn something new and bring fresh ideas back to your practice. Join us for one session — or make the most of October and attend all four!
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