Center to Advance Palliative Care

The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) is a national organization dedicated to increasing the availability of quality health care for people living with serious illness. As the nation’s leading resource in its field, CAPC provides health care professionals and organizations with the training, tools, and technical assistance necessary to effectively meet this need. Read our four-year strategic plan. CAPC is funded through organizational membership and the generous support of foundations and private philanthropy. It is part of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.

As a leading organization in its field, CAPC is deeply committed to fostering an environment that reflects and celebrates the many perspectives, identities, and experiences of our professional community and the patient communities we serve. CAPC’s content emphasizes that understanding all backgrounds and addressing culturally-specific gaps is central to quality care, and that palliative care leaders are called to address barriers faced by communities with wider gaps.

We aim to offer resources that equip all health care professionals with the tools and knowledge necessary to deliver high-quality and compassionate care to all individuals. We are also deeply committed to recruiting and supporting a staff from a variety of backgrounds who represent a constellation of perspectives and experiences.

Established in late 1999 as a National Program Office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Center to Advance Palliative Care was created in order to improve the care of people living with serious illness, and their families. For two decades, CAPC has led the nation’s growth in sustainable, high-quality palliative care programs and the standardization of best practice, the process of which aims to rapidly facilitate the translation of a growing body of evidence to implementation in the real world of clinical practice. Today, CAPC also extends its reach beyond palliative care, so that all clinicians treating serious illness have basic palliative care knowledge and skill.

Since 2006, CAPC has been supported by a consortium of foundations and private philanthropy. In 2015, CAPC became a membership organization in order to achieve the scale needed to support the expansion of palliative care, as well as its principles and core practices, across the full spectrum of health care delivery.