3

Days

 

4

Keynotes

 

80

Workshops

 

 

52

Lightning Talks

 

30

Posters 

HPCO2025  is Canada’s premier Hospice Palliative Care conference. This in-person conference attracts over 800 delegates from across Canada and worldwide, representing all professions, roles, and care settings across the healthcare continuum. We aim to highlight, inspire, and encourage fresh and innovative approaches to embracing hospice palliative care and provide opportunities to spotlight the depth and breadth of research, program delivery, and clinical practice in all care settings.

We will gather to share, debate, learn, and co-create solutions to advance hospice palliative care through five conference tracks: Research; Clinical Practice; Organizational Development; Program Design, Delivery, and Innovation, and, Caring for the Care Team.

Keynote Speakers

Grief, Love, and the Will to Go On: Lessons from Resilient Grieving

Dr. Lucy Hone  Regarded as a global thought leader in the field of resilience psychology, tragedy tested everything Dr Lucy thought she knew about resilience in deeply personal circumstances when her daughter and friends were killed in a tragic accident. Adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury and at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School, Lucy is an internationally sought-after professional speaker, best-selling author, and award-winning academic. Covid-19 saw her TED talk go viral making it one of the Top 20 of 2020. With clients ranging from Apple and Amazon, to Hospice and the UN, she helps individuals, teams and communities navigate tough times. Her work is regularly featured in global media, including the Guardian, the Hidden Brain, the Washington Post, and the BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, CBS  and ABC. Author of best-seller, Resilient Grieving, Dr Lucy is co-founder of the hugely popular Coping With Loss programme.  …. More

Death is But a Dream, Dr. Christopher Kerr

Christopher Kerr is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo where he has worked since 1999. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Chris earned his MD as well as a PhD in Neurobiology. Outside of direct patient care, Chris’ focus is in the area of patient advocacy. His passion is palliative care and a belief that such care should be throughout the continuum of illness. Under Dr. Kerr’s medical leadership, Hospice Buffalo now serves 1,200 patients a day, the majority of whom receive services upstream of hospice care. Dr. Kerr’s background in research has evolved from bench science towards the human experience of illness as witnessed from the bedside, specifically patient’s subjective experiences at the end of life. To date, the research team at Hospice Buffalo has published multiple studies on this topic and documented over 1,500 end-of-life events, many of which are videotaped. This work was the subject of his TEDx Buffalo Talk which has been viewed 5.4 million times. It has been the subject of numerous reports around the world as well as The BBC, CBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American Mind, Huffington Post,  NY Times Magazine and Psychology Today. It is also featured in a docu-series on Netflix called Surviving Death and a PBS Documentary called Death Is but A Dream. He is also involved in a third documentary, Edge of Life, to be released in 2025. Dr. Kerr’s work has also been published in a book (Death Is but A Dream) by Penguin Random House which was released in 2020 in over 10 languages.  …. More

 


Land Acknowledgement

As conference delegates gather from across Ontario and other parts of Canada, we are gathering on lands that have been home to First Nations Peoples from time immemorial. Hospice Palliative Care Ontario acknowledges that our conference taking place in what we now call Richmond Hill, is on the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Mississauga and Chippewa Nations of the Williams Treaty. We also recognize that Richmond Hill is on part of the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat.  We recognize and honour the past, present and future of the Indigenous Peoples.


 

Presenting Partner Sponsor:

 

 

Care Champion Sponsors: