About guidelines

Guidelines help with palliative care decision-making

Palliative care provision in Australia is guided by the National Palliative Care Strategy and the National Palliative Care Standards. Also highly relevant to providing care in this context are the National Consensus Statement: Essential elements for safe and high-quality end-of-life care and the Aged Care Quality Standards. These documents tell you what is expected of the care you provide. They do not provide you with the ‘how to’ of achieving these standards and indicators of care.

To deliver best-practice palliative care in line with these it will help to have access to evidence of what works. [1] Evidence-based guidelines and practical guidance can help you to meet the needs of a diverse population and optimise use of resources.

Getting started

Guidelines help you by making generalisable recommendations based on systematic analysis of the evidence. Importantly, the quality and strength of evidence is taken into consideration. The aim is to improve the consistency and outcomes of care. [2] Guidelines are particularly useful for clinicians and policy makers when designing and implementing palliative care services.

However, guidelines are often very detailed and may not be relevant to your local context of care or represent your professional discipline. This can often limit uptake into practice. Localised brief guidance documents drawing on evidence-based guidelines may be more useful in practice. Where the evidence is sparse and/or guidelines are lacking then guidance is likely to be developed based on expert opinion and the best available evidence and information. [3]

Regular updating of guidelines and guidance documents in line with current evidence is important to ensure best-practice care is being provided. In palliative care where the evidence base is maturing in some areas and growing in others it is essential.

Some tips

• You should consider what end-of-life or palliative care guidelines/guidance your organisation follows.
• The AGREE II tool can be used to assess the quality and reporting of practice guidelines.
• If you want to develop guidelines the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia has
• Standards for Guidelines which apply to all guidelines containing recommendations for clinical practice, public health and environmental health.
• Guidelines for Guidelines Handbook, containing practical and in depth information on how to develop guidelines that meet the NHMRC Standards.