Moving Palliative and End-of-life Care Forward

May 17-21, 2010
Tory Building TB 95
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Robin Fainsinger, MBChB, LMCC, CCFP, FCFP

Director of the Division of Palliative Care Medicine and Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton; Medical Director, Edmonton Zone Palliative Care Program; and Clinical Director of the Tertiary Palliative Care Unit at the Grey Nuns Hospital.

He graduated from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 1981. He and his wife immigrated to Canada in 1985 and lived in rural Saskatchewan for a number of years, where Dr. Fainsinger worked as a Family Practitioner. He obtained the CCFP in 1990 and completed the first fellowship in palliative care medicine at the University of Alberta in the same year. Since then, he has worked with the Palliative Care Program at the Edmonton General and Grey Nuns Hospitals. He was Director of the Palliative Care Program at the Royal Alexandra Hospital from October 1994 to April 2006. In addition to providing direct palliative care and pain management services, he is active in education and research, and has published many articles on a number of palliative care topics, with this interest focused in dehydration, delirium, and sedation at the end of life.

His present research focus is on developing the Edmonton Classification System for Cancer Pain (ECS-CP). He was the Interim Leader of the ACB Provincial Palliative Care Research Initiative, and was the Chair of the Assessment Research Theme of this initiative. He is a principal investigator on the Pain Net, a multidisciplinary cancer pain research network. He has over 150 publications in journals and book chapters.

Topic:

• Palliative care developments that support non-hospital deaths and end-of-life care outside of hospitals
• Canada versus global rural aging and end-of-life trends