ACPC is your ‘Highway to Help’, the brand new website that is an information hub for staff and managers in aged care facilities supporting residents who are approaching the end of their lives.
The Age Care Palliative Care (ACPC) website offers residential aged care staff a range of resources, including tools, educational materials, guidelines, and links to relevant external tools.
ACPC – www.ac-pc.com.au
This new website is an outcome of the 2023/24 ‘Comprehensive Palliative Care in Aged Care’ Project, funded by the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care and the Victorian Department of Health to improve palliative care for aged care residents.
The project also developed a framework to help staff identify palliative care needs early, enhancing the quality of life for residents by supporting staff and providing an easy-to-navigate, user-friendly website that consolidates reliable and well-sourced information.
“We conducted this project to develop and pilot a framework that provides residential aged care staff with a system to identify palliative care needs early, well before end of life, and to guide the clinical response. Early identification allows clinical teams to manage symptoms and other palliative care needs well and helps ensure that residents have the best quality of life possible. Improving the quality of life for aged care residents in the last 12 months of life is the key principle that underlies this project. Having such a system in place doesn’t only support residents; it also supports staff to deliver the best care possible to their residents they so passionately care for.” summarised Diane Nimmo the Strategic Projects and Research Manager and Project Lead of Comprehensive Palliative Care in Residential Aged Care (CPCiAC) Project.
The initiative to develop this website stemmed from the need to streamline access to essential palliative care resources, identified as a time-consuming task for staff.
“Part of the project was to audit all palliative care resources targeted to aged care staff to select the most relevant and share them with the staff involved in our pilot project. We soon realised that the sheer amount of resources available is just time-consuming and overwhelming to get through for a workforce known to be already overworked and time-poor. As we had already put in the work to audit this large number of resources and select the most up-to-date and appropriate ones, we felt this was worth sharing beyond the staff involved in our project. We are hoping that creating this website as a central and easily accessible place to find the most relevant palliative care resources will be a useful tool to assist the aged care workforce in providing timely and quality palliative care for their residents.” highlights Valerie Armenante the Project Officer Comprehensive Palliative Care in Residential Aged Care (CPCiAC) Project and a Palliative Care Clinical Nurse Consultant with Ballarat Hospice Care.
This website is becoming a crucial resource for navigating palliative care in aged care settings, offering practical guidance, evidence-based information, and resources to empower caregivers and staff in improving residents’ end-of-life quality of life. Andrew Howard, CEO of Ballarat Hospice Care, emphasises how unique and exciting the new resource is for staff within the Palliative Care industry: “I have never previously come across such a complete, comprehensive and up-to-date one-stop resource for supporting comprehensive palliative care in residential aged care. I am confident that Residential Aged Care Registered Nurses and Clinical Managers will find great benefit from having access to this resource”
This project was conducted by Ballarat Hospice Care in collaboration with the Grampians Region Palliative Care Team (Grampians Health), Central Highlands Rural Health and Grampians Region Palliative Care Consortium. It aims to develop and pilot a framework to strengthen the delivery of comprehensive, high-quality palliative care for aged care residents.
Additional funding has been allocated by the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care and the Victorian Departments of Health to continue the project, build upon its outcomes and share these learnings with more facilities in the region. The initiative aimed to implement outcomes across all residential aged care homes in the Grampians region.
