National Palliative Care Week 2024: Embracing Digital Solutions in Aged Care
A blog post by Dr Priyanka Vandersman, Senior Research Fellow, ELDAC
As we acknowledge National Palliative Care Week 2024, it is essential to reflect on the progress and challenges in palliative care within aged care. This year's theme, "Matters of Life and Death," highlights the complexity and importance of palliative care, especially for the frailest and most vulnerable older Australians in aged care settings.
The Royal Commission into Aged Care has underscored the need to make palliative care a core component of aged care services. This priority is reflected in the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, particularly Standard 5, Outcome 5.7, which focuses on Palliative and End of Life Care. To meet these standards, aged care services must provide high-quality palliative care, supported by robust documentation and reporting systems. The integration of digital solutions into clinical systems is crucial to facilitating these processes, ensuring that care providers can deliver compassionate, informed, and efficient end-of-life care.
The consideration of technology in aged care and palliative care is timely, given the significant digital transformation in Australia's health and social care landscape. Driven by the National Digital Health Strategy 2023-2028 and its corresponding Delivery Roadmap, these initiatives aim to create a digitally empowered care environment within aged care. Key systemic and policy-level shifts include the Aged Care Digital Transformation Agenda, the National Interoperability Plan, and the integration of My Health Records into aged care clinical systems. These changes, along with the Royal Commission's recommendations, are reshaping the aged care sector, presenting both challenges and opportunities. The need for evidence-based, policy-informed solutions that support care processes without increasing the workload is critical.
One such innovation is the ELDAC Project’s Digital Dashboard. This palliative care dashboard aligns with the pending revised Aged Care standards and the definitions of the aged care minimum data set. The ELDAC Dashboard captures key data points such as advance care plans, substitute decision-makers, and end-of-life care discussions. While we continue to engage with commercial IT companies and aged care service providers to scope out broader scaling of the Dashboard, this week the Digital Transformation and Delivery Division of Department of Health and Aged Care hosted us to come and speak about the ELDAC Digital Dashboard as a special presentation to mark the National palliative care week. This session not only allowed us to showcase the value of the ELDAC Dashboard to the IT and aged care sectors, but also provided reassuring support for innovation in aged care palliative care at the Departmental level.
Overall, this National Palliative Care Week, we have been able to highlight the potential of innovative digital solutions like the ELDAC Dashboard in supporting palliative care in aged care. With the aged care digital transformation agenda moving forward rapidly and end-of-life care becoming a core part of aged care, it is prudent for IT vendors and aged care services to consider solutions like the ELDAC Dashboard to support palliative care practices. For more information or to see a digital demonstration of the ELDAC Dashboard, contact eldac.project@flinders.edu.au
Let us work together to improve palliative care during the National Palliative Care Week and beyond.

Dr Priyanka Vandersman
Senior Research Fellow, ELDAC