Founding Story

In 2016, several of us were looking for an independent community of patient and family healthcare advisors that we could join.

Then as now, most of our relationships were with our host organizations and not with each other. While we do from time to time, get to know each other, we wanted more. We wanted to connect with each other, to learn from and support each other – to be part of a community.

We looked in Canada, we looked internationally but we found nothing – so we decided to form our own community.

We reached out through our personal networks and 12 of us gathered from across Canada to create the community that became PAN. We chose to start with a manifesto to define who we are, what we are about, and why we should exist. This took nine months.

We launched our public presence and website in January of 2017 followed by the site in French in the summer. We decided to grow our community by word of mouth. Our colleagues learned about PAN and many chose to join the community.