Blog

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.

Older Persons Advocacy Network (OPAN) manages the National Aged Care Advocacy Program. OPAN provides information, education and free, confidential individual advocacy to both community and residential aged care and potential consumers, their carers and families. Lewis Kaplan, former CEO of OPAN, discusses what is the relationship between good advocacy services and good palliative care.

An essential first step in our ELDAC journey was to identify the needs and challenges currently experienced by aged care providers when delivering palliative care and advance care planning. From QUT, we distributed an online survey to aged care services via the mailing lists of the peak bodies – LASA, ACSA and CHA.

It’s long been recognised that access to high quality palliative care in Australia is variable. Many Australians face difficulties in receiving palliative care due to factors such as system fragmentation, gaps in service provision, geographic scarcity of services or health professionals, access barriers for vulnerable populations and those living in residential aged care facilities, system navigation issues, low confidence of health workers in providing care to those living with a life limiting condition and limited community understanding of what palliative care is.