Quality improvement in practice

Connecting with palliative care QI projects  

Many groups and organisations provide support for palliative care QI in Australia. They include:

• Palliative Care Self Assessment (PaCSA) provides services with an online portal to self-assess against the National Palliative Care Standards (5th ed.) The Standards have been developed to be used by specialist palliative care services to support the delivery of high quality palliative care for the person receiving care (the person), their family and carers.
• Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative (PCOC) support continuous improvement in relation to symptoms, functional status and performance, and psychological and spiritual distress. PCOC has high-quality, freely accessible resources to support staff within palliative care settings to measure, assess and access standardised data.
• Assessment and response framework for routine clinical practice
• Quality improvement tools to improve compliance of clinical assessment in practice including QI audit and self-assessment planning tools
• End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC) project have developed a Working Together Toolkit (WTT) to support organisations to establish and maintain partnerships between aged, primary and palliative care services to improve care of older Australians with palliative care needs

• The Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Health Care has developed the End-of-Life Care Audit Toolkit. It can be used by health service organisations to examine and improve the quality of their end-of-life care.