Our Paediatric Palliative Medicine program at the University of Toronto thrives on a diverse patient population, excellent resources, and an outstanding teaching faculty.

Based out of The Hospital for Sick Children, our fellows routinely care for patients with varied and complex medical diagnoses. The Hospital for Sick Children provides primary, secondary and tertiary care to the local community, and tertiary and quaternary level care to the rest of Ontario and beyond, when required. All paediatric subspecialities exist at The Hospital for Sick Children, which ensures exceptional patient volume and diversity. For example, our team works closely with the Heart Transplant Program, the Complex Care Program and the NAIT (New Agents and Innovative Therapies) oncology team. Through these collaborations, our fellows are regularly exposed to innovative advancements in care. 

Our program also provides symptom management and end-of-life care at Emily’s House Children’s Hospice, a 10 bed paediatric hospice in downtown Toronto. Emily’s House offers a unique learning environment for our fellows, where the care plan focuses on making every day matter and living life to the fullest of abilities. Our program also has strong collaborative relationships with community partners across Ontario. These relationships enable home-based palliative care for our patients, and engage our fellows in building palliative care networks.

Our fellows also have unique opportunities to work alongside and learn from our expert interdisciplinary team. These experiences include providing sibling support through backyard visits with our experienced Community Psychosocial Support professional, and supporting bereaved parents through Coffee Klatches with our Grief Support Coordinators.

While the focus is paediatric palliative care, fellows with our program learn to provide palliative care across the age spectrum (from prenatal palliative care consultation through our IMPACT (Infant Maternal Perinatal Advanced Care Team) program out of Mount Sinai Hospital, to home visits for octogenarians with our adult palliative care colleagues at the Temmy Latner Centre).

Fellows also have countless opportunities to partner with faculty at the SickKids Research Institute (Canada’s largest, hospital-based child health research institute), contribute to medical education (both at the undergraduate and postgraduate level) and participate in quality improvement initiatives.