Blog

Preparing and planning for quality symptom management and palliative care should be a priority in the management of COVID-19 in residential aged care facilities. Kim Offner, Project Officer at ELDAC, discusses the lessons learnt and the practical recommendations from the Palliative Care and COVID-19 webinars which the project recently hosted.

COVID-19 presents an unprecedented challenge for patients, carers, and health professionals, especially for those providing home-based palliative care to patients. Professor Liz Reymond Director at Brisbane South Palliative Care Collaborative and Deputy Director at Metro South Palliative Care Service discusses the new caring@home packages for carers to support them to help manage symptoms in home-based palliative care patients and limit the risk of community COVID-19 transmission. 

COVID-19 is changing how we make decisions, plan for an unknown future, and respond to global changes beyond our control. Judith Lesson AM shares her views on the pandemic, and why it is important for all of us in the community to receive reliable and accurate information to make informed decisions.

Everyone should consider an advance care plan (ACP), however, ACP is a concept based on Western principles of self-determination, patient autonomy, informed consent and decision-making. These values are not universally accepted and compete with other beliefs for many older Australians. Dr Georgia Rowley from ELDAC discusses Australia’s diverse population and how diversity considerations should be made when engaging in ACP initiatives.

An important part of preparing for COVID-19 is to include advance care planning as part of your response. Only 25% of older Australians aged 65 years and over have documented their preferences in an Advance Care Directive. In her guest blog, Advance Care Planning Australia (ACPA) Program Director, Linda Nolte, shares why it is imperative to increase advance care planning for older Australians as the aged care sector prepares for the spread of the coronavirus.