Palliative Care Outcomes in Western Australia: How do they compare to the rest of the nation?

The ultimate measure of the quality of health care is the outcomes that patients and carers achieve. The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) works with services to incorporate patient and carer outcome measures into routine practice and assist services with practice quality changes. One hundred and eleven palliative care services (of about 160 in Australia) have agreed to join PCOC so far, with 85 submitting data for last PCOC Report. Those services represent more than 80% of specialist palliative care episodes in Australia. Twelve services are collecting data in Western Australia.

This presentation will highlight differences between WA and other services, for both inpatient and community services, in the profile of patients and palliative care episodes, referral source, discharge destination, symptom severity, length of stay and other functional measures. The presentation will also include a comparative analysis of the four benchmark measures: 1) Time from referral to first contact; 2) Time in the unstable phase; 3) Change in pain from beginning to end of phase; 4) change in symptoms relative to the national average using the Case Mix Adjusted Score (CAS).