Blog

General Practitioners (GPs), especially those in rural areas, face challenges when delivering palliative care for older Australians. Jennifer Tieman, CareSearch Director at Flinders University discusses how palliAGEDgp, an evidence-based and easy-to-access smartphone app, has been helping thousands of doctors support our elderly who are faced with life-limiting illness.

Older people living in residential aged care facilities need to be provided high quality end-of-life care. This will often involve nurses who will help with advance care planning and implement a palliative approach to care. Mia Taylen-Smith of Metro South Palliative Care discusses how their Improving End-of-Life Care Residential Aged Care Residents Initiative aims to enable aged care nurses.

The end of life makes older people more vulnerable to elder abuse. Dr Kelly Purser and Associate Professor Tina Cockburn from the Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology discuss the escalating, and often hidden, problem of elder abuse in Australia’s ageing population and the different forms it can take.

About a third of Australian nurses work in rural and remote practice and many are sole practitioners working in geographically diverse and challenging areas. This requires nurses to have a diverse range of skills, professional and otherwise, including the need to provide quality palliative care. One of our biggest challenges is in being able to maintain those skills in their environment. Ann Aitken, Acting Director of Nursing and Midwifery at Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Services, discusses how the palliAGEDnurse and palliAGEDgp apps provide nurses and their medical colleagues a way to gain 24/7 offline palliative care information to help them in their practice.

Pharmacists can do more than simply fill prescriptions. They can help palliative patients and those living with chronic illnesses manage, review, organise and dispose of medicines. In this CareSearch blog, Paul Tait of Southern Adelaide Palliative Services discusses how to work with pharmacists so they can better support your needs.