Schizophrenia is a serious chronic mental illness that results in marginalization and stigma for sufferers. It is the seventh leading cause for disability worldwide. The symptoms of the illness, including hallucinations, delusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior, may also introduce barriers to accessing treatment, education, housing, and employment. Little is known about endof-life care for individuals with schizophrenia. To address this gap, a scoping review was conducted to enhance understanding of hospice and palliative care for patients with schizophrenia. From this scoping review, 342 unique titles and abstracts were identified through a search of 20 databases, including 11 social science databases, 6 medical databases, and 3 gray literature databases. A total of 32 articles met the inclusion criteria and the following 4 themes were identified: 1. Stigma affecting quality of care and access to care; 2. Issues related to consent and capacity for the patient's end-of-life care decisions and to appoint substitute decision makers; 3. Best practices for psychosocial interventions, pharmacology, family and health-care collaborations, goals of care, setting, and smoking; and 4. Barriers to care, including setting, communication, provider education, and access to care. The review suggests the importance of mandatory interdisciplinary training practices and policy standards outlining cooperative communication across health-care providers. It highlights gaps in evidence-based research on psychosocial interventions and collaborative frameworks to enable the provision of quality end-of-life care for individuals with schizophrenia.

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Background: Canada's aging population is increasing, along with the number of caregivers providing support to seniors. Caregiving is a taxing responsibility that often results in loneliness and distress. Creating awareness of available supports for caregivers is essential for their health and to provide the best support to the care recipients. This study aims to better understand and improve the caregiving experience for caregivers from diverse ethnic communities and the LGBTQI2S+ communities. The goal is to improve the well-being and resilience of caregivers and optimize outcomes for care recipients by delivering educational workshops that resemble the design of existing workshops currently offered by the participating social service agency. Content will be adapted based on identified participant learning needs. These workshops will be offered to the English-speaking community, diverse newcomer ethnic groups and the LGBTQI2S+ community. Methods: This mixed-methods, longitudinal study includes two streams of caregivers; Stream One consists of English-speaking caregivers and care recipients while Stream Two includes individuals from the Afghan, Iranian, Somali-, Tamil-and Spanish-speaking populations and those belonging to LGBTQI2S+ communities. Each stream has two phases; Phase One includes needs assessments using focus groups and semi-structured interviews with caregivers and care recipients while Phase Two includes a pre-test post-test evaluation of educational workshops. The anticipated sample size for Phase One is 30 caregivers from the English-speaking community, 150 from the five linguistic/cultural communities combined and 30 from the LGBTQI2S+ group. For Phase Two, we plan to recruit 250 caregivers from the English-speaking community, 250 from the five linguistic/cultural communities, and 50 from the LGBTQI2S+ group. Discussion: To provide caregivers with optimal support, we must acknowledge the caregivers and care recipients from diverse communities. Currently, at least two focus groups have been conducted with caregivers from each of the seven targeted groups and workshops have begun for all communities. Recruitment has been a challenge for all groups, but our team continues to conduct outreach with caregivers and will use our learning to inform the delivery of educational caregiver workshops.

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