Division of Palliative Care

The Division of Palliative Care, hosted in the Department of Family Medicine, is a joint division of the Department of Family Medicine and the Department of Medicine at McMaster University. It is an interprofessional academic division with a mandate to support the academic mission of the Department of Family Medicine and the Department of Medicine and their partners, as well as the entire Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University and the broader university in the area of palliative and end-of-life care.

Our mandate is carried out through scholarship, including education and teaching, research and quality improvement (QI).

The division has over 65 members from different professions, including medicine, nursing, social work, spiritual care and research. Our members are distributed across many different sites in Southern Ontario, including the Hamilton, Niagara, Brantford, Burlington, Brampton, Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo regions.

Most of the members are clinicians who work in different care settings – including hospitals, palliative care units, hospices, long-term care and the community – and in different roles, from consultation and shared care support to most responsible clinician. This clinical diversity and experience allows the Division of Palliative Care to be firmly connected to clinical care, to provide health systems leadership and advance palliative care across several fronts.

While most members have their primary appointments in the Department of Family Medicine or the Department of Medicine, we have several members whose primary appointment are in other departments, such as the Department of Pediatrics and in the School of Nursing at McMaster University.