Palliative care is improving, but PEI must embrace wishes of the dying

More than 17 per cent of the Island’s 140,000 people are over 65, compared to just over 15 per cent for the country as a whole. In five years, the provincial figure will be 20 per cent; in 25 years, it will be 30. Those figures in a largely rural population are a challenge for Mireille Lecours, palliative-care medical consultant for the province. She has made great strides in improving palliative care by supporting dying patients at home, in community-care facilities, as inpatients in palliative-care units and especially in long-term-care facilities. “Those are people’s homes,” she says. “They should be centres of excellence for palliative care.”