Sector news

Older people living in residential aged care facilities need to be provided high quality end-of-life care. This will often involve nurses who will help with advance care planning and implement a palliative approach to care. Mia Taylen-Smith of Metro South Palliative Care discusses how their Improving End-of-Life Care Residential Aged Care Residents Initiative aims to enable aged care nurses.

Staff at the Aged Care Complaints Commissioner have been listening to the stories of those dying in aged care since we first began on 1 January 2016. These stories help us to understand the needs of dying people and their families, and to work with service providers to ensure that their palliative care improves. Jan McGregor, Director at Aged Care Complaints Commissioner’s Clinical Unit discusses the most difficult complaints to resolve are those where there has been a breakdown in communication between the service and the family and the importance of communication in palliative care.  

Online health information is available and accessible almost instantaneously; in Australia this is true for most individuals with internet connections, from any digital device. Sourcing evidence-based research and information regarding health is crucial in informing decision making, improving knowledge and skills, and guiding service choices and clinical practice for health professionals and care workers. Virtual health resources are widely used in clinical care settings; individuals routinely search online for answers to health-related queries, which may assist their ability to appropriately service others in their care. For individuals working in aged care, accessing online information facilitates timely answers to their queries or may contribute to their ongoing professional education. Health professionals and care workers are also well-positioned to refer their clients or patients to trustworthy, reputable, and up-to-date online health resources.
 

In my role managing two aged care homes in Melbourne, I have come across a number of challenges which needed to be overcome. I took over one home four and a half years ago and the second 18 months ago, discovering the same basic issues in each home; after the first time, the issues were relatively easy to change. Staff were fractured in the sense that departments did not necessarily rely on each other and work together, and knowledge of clinical issues was only handed over to clinical staff, not to the whole home (not an unusual happening). My idea of sharing with all staff was greeted with a degree of scepticism at first, but staff embraced it quite quickly and then started to discuss things across different departments.

For this discussion, aged care refers to the additional care required for an older person needing regular health professional input either in the community or in an aged care home.

Palliative care is, according to the WHO (World Health Organisation), ‘an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual’.

We all know that the population is ageing; and the figures forecasted are significant with around 15% (3.6 million people) older than 65 years in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2013). These figures will continue to soar, and by 2031 it is estimated 19% (5.7 million) of the population will be older than 65 years (ABS, 2013).

In 2015 it was reported that 75% of people aged 65 and over who died in Australia used an aged care service in the 12 months before their death, and 60% were an aged care client at the time of their death (AIHW, 2015).  These figures alone point out the obvious key role the aged care sector plays in ensuring a person’s quality of life reaches its maximum potential as they approach the end of their lives, and inherent within that is the role aged care plays in ensuring a good death.