The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) is the national evidence hub on patients’ daily pain and symptom outcomes in Australia. The purpose of PCOC to drive continuous improvement by providing outcome information to clinicians and local, state and national providers of palliative care. PCOC holds information on more than 250,000 people which is used to assess the effectiveness of palliative care over the last decade.
Every patient has the right to effective treatment and management for pain and symptoms. PCOC uses five clinical assessment tools to help identify and manage these common symptoms. The tools also allow the effectiveness of treatments to be evaluated and, importantly, they help patients, carers and families to communicate their experiences and preferences.
The clinical assessment tools are: Palliative Care Phase (326kb pdf), Palliative Care Problem Severity Score (PCPSS) (59kb docx), Symptom Assessment Scale (SAS) (168kb docx), Australia-modified Karnofsky Performance Status (AKPS) (59kb docx) scale and Resource Utilisation Groups – Activities of Daily Living (RUG-ADL) (59kb docx).
PCOC also recently launched the Essentials online course, designed for managers and clinicians learning about the PCOC assessment tools, implementing PCOC and reports.
PCOC is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and is managed by a collaboration of four universities led by the University of Wollongong's Australian Health Services Research Institute.
Last Updated 25 June 2018