CareSearch Director and Matthew Flinders Fellow Professor Jennifer Tieman served as an expert witness in one of the Aged Care Royal Commission hearings in Perth.
In her submission for the hearing, Professor Tieman outlined her recommendations for overcoming the obstacles in providing person-centred palliative care in our current aged care system. These are:
- Conduct campaigns to help normalise death, dying and palliative care. Greater emphasis and promotion of death and dying as being part of life frames the care environment in which individuals, families and systems are operating. In addition, normalising dying supports the value of advance care planning as a normal part of life planning.
- Include palliative care in aged care training and education. Careworker training should include palliative care. There is also the need to make the range of education already available more accessible to the aged care and primary care sectors.
- Expand the range of guidance resources developed to support the Aged Care Quality Standards to highlight palliative care examples and resources to support proactive palliative care recognition, assessment and care provision.
- Integrate solutions across systems. There needs to be clarity around how the state funded palliative care services interface with those in receipt of commonwealth funded aged care services.
- Develop and improve access to technology and digital solutions to increase communication and coordination between providers. Given an increasing commitment to homecare packages in aged care and community based palliative care services, digital solutions will be important.
- Analyse funding to improve resourcing for aged care and primary care services.
- Strengthen support for family, family carers, and surrogate decision makers for older Australians so their roles in end of life can be properly recognised and integrated.
- Remember that death and dying is not just a medical or health event, it is a human experience. Hence, care needs to be person centred and adapted to the situation of the individual person.
Palliative Care Australia Board Chair Dr Jane Fisher and Deputy Director of Metro South Palliative Care Service Dr Elizabeth Reymond also served as expert witnesses along with Professor Tieman.