Palliative Care Australia (PCA) aims to ensure that everyone who is accessing or thinking about accessing aged care services knows the importance of being able to access palliative care within the service.
What is palliative care?
Palliative care can be provided at any stage of an illness and alongside life prolonging treatments provided by medical specialists and other doctors. For some people, palliative care may be beneficial from the time of diagnosis with a serious life-limiting illness.
Palliative care is holistic care that helps people to live well with a life-limiting or terminal illness and focuses on quality of life, comfort and dignity. It is also about supporting family members and carers through the course of the person’s illness and in their bereavement phase.
Specialist palliative care services take a team approach and collaborate with other health providers, especially aged care providers, to ensure that care provided is focused on the whole individual; their physical, emotional, practical and spiritual needs.
Not everyone will require referral to specialist palliative care services and their symptoms and support required can be well managed by their GP and aged care staff.
Palliative care in aged care
More than 350,000 Australians are cared for in the aged care system. Many of these people will face the end of their lives in these facilities. This experience should be as comfortable and as positive as possible. If you are considering moving to an aged care facility or are helping a loved one explore their options, you should ask providers about palliative care options and discuss what end-of-life supports they offer. When a person is approaching the end of their life, some residential aged care facilities offer extended visiting hours and spaces for family members to stay.
Aged care services face challenges when it comes to providing palliative care, as many residents in their facilities may experience more than one chronic illness at the same time. This can mean that at times residents’ health care needs are complex and require different approaches.
For example, people living with dementia and other cognitive illnesses will require a different approach to care at the end of life than people with other conditions such as cancer. Dementia is a terminal condition and there is currently no cure. The fact that dementia will result in death is not something that is easy to come to terms with and carers for people living with dementia need to complete end-of-life planning early after diagnosis.
During National Palliative Care Week PCA will also highlight formal and informal linkages between aged care providers and specialist palliative care teams as being critical to delivery of high quality end-of-life care. The Commonwealth-funded Decision Assist project, implemented nationally, has enabled enhancements of linkages between service providers involved in the delivery of palliative and end-of-life care to older Australians, resulting in the delivery of high quality end of life care.
How do I get involved?
Palliative care organisations from all states and territories will be hosting a range of different events during National Palliative Care Week to raise awareness for palliative care in aged care settings and increase the engagement between aged care providers, clients and their carers. PCA encourages everyone to talk about their end-of-life care wishes with their loved ones and health care team by completing the Dying to Talk Discussion Starter.
