Addressing the Standards
The Current Aged Care Landscape
Australia's aged care reforms have strengthened the focus on quality, person centred care across residential aged care and home care settings. Together, the Aged Care Act, Aged Care Quality Standards and Support at Home program reinforce the importance of care that respects older people's rights, preferences, goals and wellbeing.
Key reforms relevant to palliative and end of life care include:
- The rights based Aged Care Act, which reinforces the rights of older people to dignity, autonomy, informed decision making and choice throughout their care journey.
- The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, which set expectations for safe, effective and person-centred care across aged care services.
- The Support at Home program, including the End-of-Life Pathway, which provides additional support for people with end-of-life care needs and helps them remain at home when this aligns with their preferences.
Understanding the Aged Care Quality Standards
The Aged Care Quality Standards provide a framework for delivering safe, high-quality care and services. They guide providers to deliver care that is responsive to individual needs and preferences, while supporting positive outcomes and experiences for older people.
Palliative and End of Life Care and the Standards
Supporting older people with palliative and end of life care needs is an important part of quality aged care. This is reflected across the Aged Care Quality Standards through expectations related to person centred care, communication, care planning, clinical care and informed decision making.
Palliative and end of life care is most explicitly addressed in Standard 5: Clinical Care, which focuses on delivering safe, effective and coordinated clinical care that responds to each person's needs, preferences and goals.
Within Outcome 5.7: Palliative Care and End of Life Care, providers are expected to:
- recognise and respond to palliative and end of life care needs
- support advance care planning and shared decision making
- assess and manage symptoms
- communicate with older people, families and carers
- coordinate care across services and care settings
- support families and carers before and after death.
Putting the Standards into Practice
Meeting the expectations of the Aged Care Quality Standards requires ongoing learning, capability development and continuous improvement. ELDAC provides practical resources, tools and programs to help services strengthen palliative and end of life care and support quality practice.
You can use ELDAC to:
- Build knowledge and confidence by exploring the ELDAC Care Model, resources and learning materials that support staff to understand the principles and practices of quality palliative and end of life care.
- Strengthen practice and quality improvement through the ELDAC Residential Aged Care and Home Care Toolkits, which provide practical guidance, tools and activities to support implementation in everyday care.
- Build local partnerships through the ELDAC Linkages Program, which supports aged care providers to connect with primary care, specialist palliative care and community services, strengthening support for older people and their families.