Blog

Art therapy is used in palliative care to compliment a holistic approach to care and to augment traditional clinical and medical approaches. In this blog, Estelle Chapple, an Art Therapist for Central Adelaide Palliative Care, and Michelle Cripps, Director for Centre for Creative Health, discuss the impact of art therapy in palliative care settings.

The last five years has seen major change in aged care policy directions and regulation. In this blog, CareSearch and palliAGED Director Professor Jennifer Tieman discusses the importance of reviewing and consolidating aged care resources to ensure currency, relevance, and ease of access, and how palliAGED responds to the varied and changing contexts in which care is provided.

Discussions about CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation) are difficult because they confront the person with death. However, when cardiac arrest occurs there is no time to ponder the pros and cons of CPR or to discuss this with the person’s substitute medical treatment decision-maker. Dr Barbara Hayes, Clinical Lead in Advance Care Planning and Palliative Care Consultant at Northern Health, discusses the importance of increasing awareness of CPR decision-making prior to acute illness and why discussions and decisions are a necessary part of medical treatment planning.

Informing people with vastly different backgrounds, literacy levels and capacity, as well as roles is a challenge. This is why in the 2017-2020 project period, CareSearch and palliAGED began the Engagement Project working with specific groups (allied health, aged care and patients, carers, and families) to learn more about how they find and use health care information and what information about end of life and palliative care they need. Dr Katrina Erny-Albrecht, Senior Research Fellow for CareSearch discusses some key findings from the project and the central importance of context.

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.