palliAGED updates

Providing palliative care is an essential part of quality aged care. To support aged care nurses with the basics of palliative care, we will soon release a series of online introductory modules to complement the highly successful evidence-based palliAGED Practice Tip Sheet resources. Release of the modules is planned to coincide with this year's National Palliative Care Week. They will be freely available from the website along with all of the palliAGED resources including our range of forms for aged care.

palliAGED has released new pages to support pharmacists in caring for older Australians. The pages feature information and resources on the important role of pharmacists, managing medications, dosing guides, supporting caregivers, education and professional development, and more.

The CareSearch Project is undertaking a major re-structure of its current website to offer a rich set of integrated resources for the palliative care community that can be easily navigated.

The portal will include a major aged care centre which will feature palliAGED and other projects offering practical resources and information. You can participate in the building of the new portal by sharing your insights.

We are pleased to introduce two new team members who will be working with us to deliver support across the 2020-23 period.

Dr Deborah van Gaans is the Research Associate (Evidence) for the CareSearch Project. She has a background in health informatics and spatial science, and has led a couple of projects which assess the accessibility of health services to the population that they serve.

Kristina Walsh is a Research Associate for CareSearch and palliAGED. Kristina has a registered nurse background with a particular focus on community nursing. Having spent many years caring for people towards the end of life at home and supporting people with chronic and complex health conditions, Kristina will focus on palliAGED and the community aspects of CareSearch.

Supporting the aged care workforce to deliver quality home care for older Australians, particularly those who are needing palliative care, is crucial. We have free resources that can help:

• Practice Tip Sheets for careworkers
• Practice Tip Sheets for nurses
• Case conference forms for home care
• Palliative Care Support for Patients, Carers, and Families booklet from CareSearch

Place your order via this form.

CareSearch has launched the national Part of Life campaign to encourage community awareness of palliative care and highlight a host of free resources and information for all Australians, including those needing and providing aged care.

The campaign aims to support community members and health professionals to learn, care, and plan for palliative care, dying, and death. It highlights the six guiding principles of the National Palliative Care Strategy, which have been identified as fundamental to ensure that all people experience the palliative care they need and ideals that we all have to work towards.

palliAGED has developed a search filter to support easy and rapid access to the latest peer-reviewed information on issues in aged care. All information comes from PubMed, the large biomedical database made available by the United States National Library of Medicine.

To help the aged care workforce who are among our front line responders to COVID-19, in addition to our COVID-19 section in palliAGED, we have created a new page where we highlight noteworthy resources.

Psychosocial Care sits at the core of palliative care and connects to many of the 38 topics already available on the palliAGED website. Psychosocial care denotes the psychological, spiritual and social aspects of a person’s life, their emotions, thoughts, attitudes, motivation and behaviour, and the way in which a person relates to and interacts with their world. In practice, awareness of and attendance to psychosocial support should be a part of all aspects of palliative care. You can also read the blog by Susan Gravier and Robyn Dutschke on this release.

For more than ten years, the Palliative Approach (PA) Toolkit has supported residential aged care facilities to implement a comprehensive, evidence-based, person-centred, and sustainable approach to palliative care. Since its release in 2009, there have been many changes to the evidence base and palliAGED and End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC) now support the aged care sector. The PA Toolkit was retired on 30 June 2020 after the completion of a content transition plan.