Support for services to measure outcomes in palliative care
The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration has launched a new essentials online course for managers and clinicians to support their knowledge and implementation of the program and its tools.
The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration has launched a new essentials online course for managers and clinicians to support their knowledge and implementation of the program and its tools.
The PCOC quality initiative is a national program that measures and benchmarks patient outcomes in palliative care.
The voluntary program, which has been running since 2005, measures outcomes for pain, physical symptoms, psychological and spiritual needs, and family and carer outcomes to drive improvements in care.
The Essentials short course provides an overview for clinicians to support their implementation of the program’s clinical assessment tools and patient outcome reports.
For managers, the course aims to help them understand how to use the data collected to improve the effectiveness of their services and models of care.
Complementing the short course is a series of fundamentals and advanced workshops.
PCOC is based at the University of Wollongong’s Australian Health Services Research Institute and funded by the Australian Government.
For more information or to participate in the online course, click here.
PCOC has also launched a new website with targeted information on the program for service providers, patients and families, and researchers and policymakers.
ELDAC project
Elsewhere in the field of palliative care, the second phase of the End of Life Directions for Aged Care capacity-building project was launched last week.
Key components of the second phase will be to provide coordination and advisory services to assist aged care providers to work across traditional boundaries of care and a series of policy roundtables on palliative care, said ELDAC project director and QUT head of nursing Professor Patsy Yates.
“These roundtables will focus on funding mechanisms, the aged care workforce and other key policy matters that will enable quality palliative care for older Australians,” Professor Yates said.
A technology prototype to “find and track” meaningful data about the care of clients and residents at the end of life will also be developed.
The ELDAC website includes five interactive toolkits for workers that provide up-to-date clinical evidence and organisational tools on palliative care and advance care planning.
