Who would have thought you would grow into such a big beautiful creature? I have watched you grow from a tiny baby with just a couple of pages and no teeth to speak of into a gorgeous site with apparently unlimited pages, well-proportioned functionality and what an attractive menu bar! You even have your own learning management system. You have mixed with the right crowd and your linkages with some 10,000 other valuable webpages are impressive.
As you have grown digitally you have become indispensable to the palliative care sector and you support us all with your evidence-based teeth! I hope I am not embarrassing you, but all of us in the palliative care family are so proud of your growth and ongoing achievements.
Palliative care professionals and consumers need easy, rapid access to reliable information to make informed, often difficult, decisions about care. CareSearch acts as a repository for that information – either directly or through digital linkages.
CareSearch augments clinical efficiency and effectiveness by rigorously undertaking the time intensive, valuable work of identifying, evaluating, synthesising and disseminating quality information and best available evidence on palliative care. Clinicians respect CareSearch and know they can trust the information gained through the website.
Palliative care affects most people at some stage of their life. CareSearch is a valuable resource for these consumers by providing easy-to-understand palliative care information across a broad domain of issues.
Some of these important issues include: how to find a palliative care service, how to care for a palliative patient, and understanding and coping with grief, loss and bereavement. CareSearch tailors this information to suit as many Australians as possible including those living in rural and remote areas, people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait cultures, the LBGTI community, prisoners and those with intellectual disability and those experiencing mental illness. For many years, CareSearch has supported the aged care community to achieve best outcomes in palliative care.
CareSearch is active in expanding the clinical palliative care evidence base by supporting national, state and territory and local research projects. Importantly, it also conducts its own research across a variety of palliative care domains. Further, it provides palliative care education and tailors that education to the needs of various clinical subpopulations such as pharmacists, nurses, allied health professionals, general practitioners, hospital doctors and aged care professionals.
Over the years, CareSearch has become progressively more embedded into the palliative care sector. It is now well respected as an integral part of the sector and indeed regularly provides research and policy advice to various organisations and groups in the field of palliative care. Governments, peak bodies and jurisdictional policy and strategy units also request data and opinion from CareSearch staff.
CareSearch you truly are a great resource! It is hard to imagine the productive and innovative advances you will make in the digital palliative care space in the next 10 years.
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Professor Liz Reymond, Deputy Director, Metro South Palliative Care Service, Metro South Health Queensland