The Construction of British Columbia's Palliative Care Benefits Policy and Implications for Nursing Practice

Nurses have a critical role to play in creating, implementing, critiquing, and advancing health policy within diverse contexts to ensure people living with life-limiting illness receive equitable and ethical access to palliative care services and programs. This article describes a critical analysis of the British Columbia's Palliative Care Benefits (BCPCB). The BCPCB is a provincial government program in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, that provides eligible residents with palliative care services at home. Utilizing Fairclough's Dialectical-Relational Critical Discourse Analysis, the study investigates the process by which BCPCB determines B.C. residents' eligibility and access to resources proportionate to their need, function, illness burden, and urgency. This article reviews the construction of palliative care in Canada and how current biomedical perspectives construct palliative care policy and services in B.C. The findings indicate that the BCPCB program produces vague, discriminatory, and ableist prognostication practices through the implementation of its eligibility policy. This article also suggests that palliative care nurses are optimally positioned for policy influence: to critique, disrupt, and transform the BCPCB Program and palliative care practices.