A view from the 6th floor: Statewide service planning and sector reform in South Australia

In late 2007 the South Australian Department of Health released a major health plan to drive substantial health reform in South Australia for decades to come. The state plan called for the production of a statewide palliative care services plan that would direct the provision of palliative care services across South Australia for the period 2008 to 2016.

As we are all well aware, there are a number of significant demographic challenges related to the aging of the population and the decline in the size of the workforce that caste dark shadows on the horizon, and their implications for service planning and the work and the roles of nurses will be profound. For those of us still working in 2016, it is no longer possible to presume that the work environment of specialist palliative care nurses will closely resemble that of today.

The planning process that led to the production of the SA Health: Palliative Care Services Plan 2008-16 took the authors of this paper through a meandering course involving an extensive review of evidence, models of care, population data and trend analysis and a wide ranging process of consultation and deliberation with stakeholders well beyond the palliative care sector. This paper presents some of the issues, opportunities, threats and challenges that may lay head for nurses. It will focus in particular on key aspects of population based service planning, regionalised service delivery models, changing role expectations and role renegotiation, along with a raft of trends and innovations that may emerge in the years to come.