In August-September the CareSearch Engagement Project team met in Adelaide with members of the aged care and allied health sectors, and patients, families and carers. It was great to have so many participants return for the second workshops and we are very thankful to everyone for taking time out of their busy schedules to work with us. At the workshops we reported on CareSearch / palliAGED activity and achievements over the past year and discussed as a group the impact of this on palliative care awareness and what the next steps might be. In September we were also busy at the 2019 Oceanic Palliative Care Conference including presentation of a number of posters on the Engagement Project. These can now be viewed on the CareSearch publications page.

In September CareSearch opened new Quality Improvement (QI) pages in the Finding Evidence section on Grey Literature. Including information on What is Quality Improvement and QI support and appraisal the new pages support our recent introduction of QI reports to the CareSearch Grey Literature database. The first QI report from PCOC has now been uploaded and we look forward to providing access to these and other reports on palliative care QI initiatives from across Australia in the future.  You can also read more about this in our Blog Quality improvement – what now? If you know of other palliative care QI initiatives that might be considered for adding to this database please contact us at caresearch@flinders.edu.au.

Advance care planning is especially important as it assists health professionals to understand what choices and decisions have been made, how someone would like to be cared for, and the direction of treatment plans. However not all residential aged care facilities implement advance care planning policies. Nurse Practitioner Sharyn Speakman from Bushland Health Group discusses her experience and the processes she used to develop an advance care planning policy and procedures for the Bushland Health Group residential aged care facilities. 

Paul Tait from End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC) discusses how the ELDAC project has identified twelve commonly used clinical tools useful when caring for older people, with palliative care needs. Clinical tools provide standardised ways to assess changes to a person’s health, and are particularly useful when health needs can become increasingly complicated as a person approaches the last 12 months of life.