Biennially, Palliative Care McGill hosts Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Day, a full-day workshop for healthcare professionals to network, enhance their skills, and stay up to date on the latest palliative care developments. Bringing together professionals from across the medical world, CPD Day has been a valuable learning opportunity since its inception. Golda Tradounsky, MD, Team Leader of Palliative Care Services at Mount Sinai Hospital, provides more insight into everything 2025’s edition of this event has to offer:
Lexa Frail (LF): First of all, what is CPD Day, and why is it so important?
Golda Tradounsky (GT): So, CPD Day is a day of palliative care teachings that we offer to healthcare providers dealing with patients with a serious illness. We want to make it interdisciplinary, and we want to try to reach out to as many people out in our Quebec and Canadian community, as far and wide as possible. Initially, when we started CPD Day for palliative care, we thought we might give some very basic knowledge and training to doctors and nurses. But after our very first CPD day, we realized that the majority of people who were attending tended to already be doing some palliative care. They were already knowledgeable, so they were asking for something a little more expert level. It's a great day. We always make sure we try to answer the needs for knowledge and skills and the questions that people who are providing palliative care might have by looking at previous participants' suggestions.
LF: That's excellent. What do you want healthcare professionals to take away from CPD day?
GT: We are a big community. We're all here to learn from each other. I think that is certainly true for people who've been working in the field for only a few months and those who've been working for many years. There's always more to learn. This is a good opportunity to network with people who are working in the field and have varied expertise. As a priority, we want people to feel like they can reach out to other people and get the help they need to give the best care possible. Promoting palliative care, particularly the importance of providing good care for patients and their families throughout their serious illness trajectory as early on as possible, all the way until the last breath, is another big takeaway.
LF: I was wondering if you could let us know what topics you plan to address at this year's CPD Day?
GT: We have quite a bit on pain this year as pain can be quite a complex symptom. We will discuss total pain, along with some of the side effects of the medications, namely, opioid neurotoxicity. We'll look at different ways of addressing pain with medications that healthcare providers might not be so familiar with: cannabis and buprenorphine. There's also going to be a couple of panels, including one that addresses complex cases with ethical issues. This panel is going to present the case(s), discuss them and then open to the audience for questions and input.
The other panel will focus on advocacy and how we can improve access to palliative care, with different examples of what’s being done for different groups of people, including the pediatric clientele. Other interesting subjects include how we can take care of patients who have substance use disorder—and the complexities of that—as well as the novel use of ketamine, which we know can be helpful for pain, but is now being used for other symptoms, such as depression and anxiety. Overall, that’s a pretty full day. Again, we’re trying to reach healthcare providers with varying levels of experience, address potential knowledge gaps, and, for those people who are quite expert, go a little bit beyond and offer new and exciting information that can be applied potentially to their clientele.
LF: That sounds like a great lineup. We're looking forward to it. Is there anything else you would like to add?
GT: We are making this CPD day hybrid: there will be a Zoom component. We want to make sure that people from across Quebec can participate and reach others beyond our province! CPD Day will be given in English, but we can certainly answer questions in French. Our speakers are all pretty much bilingual and we hope a lot of people are going to be interested in this day.
CPD Day 2025 will be held on November 21, 2025. Make sure to stay tuned for more details over the next few months.