Business Commons^™

Improving National Hospice/Palliative Care Service Symptom Outcomes Systematically Through Point-Of-Care Data Collection, Structured Feedback And Benchmarking, David Currow, Samuel Allingham, Patsy Yates, Claire Johnson, Katherine Clark, Kathy Eagar

Sydney Business School - Papers

Purpose Every health care sector including hospice/palliative care needs to systematically improve services using patient-defined outcomes. Data from the national Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration aims to define whether hospice/palliative care patients' outcomes and the consistency of these outcomes have improved in the last 3 years.

Methods Data were analysed by clinical phase (stable, unstable, deteriorating, terminal). Patient-level data included the Symptom Assessment Scale and the Palliative Care Problem Severity Score. Nationally collected point-of-care data were anchored for the period July-December 2008 and subsequently compared to this baseline in six 6-month reporting cycles for all services that submitted data in …

The Palliative Care Phase Assessment In Practice, Sabina P. Clapham, Maree Banfield

Sydney Business School - Papers

PCOC is a national approach towards the routine assessment in palliative care practice using standardised assessment tools.

Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration: Improving The Quality Of Palliative Care Using Routine, Standard Patient Assessments, Maree Banfield

Sydney Business School - Papers

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) allows palliative care nurses to more effectively evaluate the quality of care being provided to patients. The PCOC was established in 2005 under the National Palliative Care Program and is supported by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing. The collaboration includes the University of Wollongong, the University of Western Australia Flinders University and Queensland University of Technology, with associated quality improvement facilitators to assist services with PCOC.

Rural Palliative Care Program National Evaluation Project: Patient And Carer Experiences, Pamela E. Grootemaat, Karen Quinsey, Alan G. Owen

Sydney Business School - Papers

[extract] Palliative care services in Australia are provided across a range of inpatient, outpatient and community settings by a mix of specialist and generalist providers from the public and private sectors. There is little evidence to guide the provision of palliative care in rural areas and few large scale studies that reflect on patient and carer experiences. The national Rural Palliative Care Program was implemented to provide support for palliative care interventions and to develop evidence on their effectiveness. An important part of that evidence is whether patients and their carers actually found the interventions to be helpful to them.