The Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care is dedicated to relieving suffering and improving quality of life for adults and children who are living with and dying from a life-threatening illness. The Centre's highly specialized counsellors provide expert psychosocial support and education to children and their caregivers living with the dying and death of a loved one, and its physicians and clinical staff provide compassionate end-of-life care. 

The professionals from the Temmy Latner Centre honour the wishes of patients with a terminal illness who wish to die in the comfort of their own home, surrounded by loving family and friends and familiar objects.

Through educational, research and leadership initiatives, the Centre demonstrates its ongoing commitment to achieving excellent accessible end-of-life care at the local, provincial, national and international level.

Respected and renowned leaders in the development and implementation of unique, innovative palliative care programs, the Centre's professionals are recognized authorities in standards of practice, education, pain and symptom control, and grief and bereavement counselling.

Since opening its doors in 1989, the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care has become one of Canada's largest palliative care centres, encompassing a unique spectrum of services. The Centre's leading-edge Home Palliative Care Program enables people who are dying from a terminal illness to be cared for at home. In addition, Mount Sinai Hospital patients have access to the Centre's palliative care doctors who become part of their health-care team and facilitate a smooth transfer to the Home Palliative Care Program. The Max and Beatrice Wolfe Children's Centre is one of the few specialized centres in Ontario that offers community-based medical and counselling support for dying children and their families in their home. The Dr. Jay Children's Grief Program educates and supports children who have a loved one who is dying or who has died. The Centre's many research projects and professional education initiatives underpin all of these programs and services.

The following statistics and initiatives attest to the success of the Temmy Latner Centre:

• Each year, the physicians care for more than 2,500 adults and children.
• The Home Palliative Care Program provides 24/7 care to more than 600 patients on a daily basis.
• The Centre's physicians help over 60 per cent of their patients to die in comfort and with dignity at home by working collaboratively with the Community Care Access Centres, community nursing agencies, local hospices and other community partners.
• From April 2008 to March 2009, the Max and Beatrice Wolfe Children's Centre and the Dr. Jay Children's Grief Program provided outstanding support to 283 children from 146 families.
• The Centre's dedicated counsellors use a variety of highly effective counselling techniques such as expressive arts therapies and literature. Almost 100 children have benefited from special events, such as camp days, which use play therapy to address their concerns and teach them about life and death and the life cycle.
• The Centre is affiliated with the University of Toronto and other educational institutions and teaches more than 1,000 health care professionals about palliative care each year.
• Funding from the Windfields Farm Limited Clinical Research Unit supports collaborative research and efforts to establish an internationally recognized research centre in palliative care. Recent research initiatives include a study on lung cancer patients' experience with continuity of care and supportive care needs, as well as the development of a data warehouse to support the Centre's continuous improvement processes.
• Internationally, the Latner Centre has special relationships with centres in Brazil, Thailand and Malawi to help those countries build palliative care service and education programs.