Primary Care - Team Support
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Team Support

It is important to support practice team members in building the knowledge, confidence and skills needed to provide palliative care. This section covers key actions and learnings to help enhance the delivery of care in teams. Difficult areas of care are recognised, like end-of-life law and risk, and the need to take care of personal wellbeing due to the sensitive nature of palliative care.

Caring for someone at the end of life can be challenging, especially when it involves interacting with the law.

The ELDAC End of Life Law Toolkit provides practical information about the law at end of life in the form of fact sheets, case studies and mythbusters.

The toolkit covers the following topics:

  • Capacity and Consent to Medical Treatment
  • Advance Care Directives
  • Substitute Decision-Making
  • Withholding and Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Treatment
  • Legal Protection for Administering Pain and Symptom Relief
  • Futile or Non-Beneficial Treatment
  • Emergency Medical Treatment
  • Managing Disputes about Medical Treatment Decision-Making
  • Voluntary Assisted Dying.

Information is tailored for each State and Territory.

Effective governance and risk management is a critical part of safe, effective, appropriate and quality care. It starts at the top, with the organisation’s board responsible for setting the tone and culture on risk management, and clearly communicating this throughout the organisation.
The ELDAC Managing Risk Toolkit is designed for health professionals and care staff providing palliative care and advance care planning for older Australians living in residential care with advanced life-limiting illnesses, their families and carers. It provides information and guidance on managing risk at the end of life for people living in residential aged care and for their families.
Resources cover the topics of Nutrition and Hydration, Medication Management and Transfers of residents between care settings and towards the end of life.
While specific to residential aged care settings, lessons can be transferred across to primary care.

Looking after people who are coming towards the end of their life can have an impact on how you and your colleagues act and feel.

Practising self-care can help you maintain your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing so you can continue to care.

Encouraging and enabling colleagues to practice self-care is also important to support your practice team.

Self-Care Room

ELDAC

The Self-care Room is a place for clinicians working in palliative care and advance care planning to explore, share and use self-care resources to support their wellbeing.

Self-Care Matters

Palliative Care Australia

This webpage provides a series of resources on understanding, planning and practising self-care to prevent burn-out and build resilience in palliative care provision for clinicians.

Healthcare is a constantly evolving field as research provides us new insights on how to provide best-practice care that drives improvements in outcomes and experiences. As a result, maintaining awareness of palliative care education opportunities can be a challenge.

Below, you can find activities to support practice team members’ ongoing learning.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

Refer to the Continuing Professional Development section of this Toolkit for a list of education and training opportunities for general practitioners, nurses and practice managers. All programs listed provide CPD points, and are detailed in their duration, cost and mode of study, respectively.

ELDAC Personal Learning Assessment

To assist in identifying learning needs, the interactive ELDAC Personal Learning Assessment and Learning Plan can be used. The interactive assessment form below allows you and your team members to identify personal learning and development needs and can be used annually to identify top learning and development priorities.

There are two sections to the assessment:

  • Section 1: Knowledge of palliative care and advance care planning
  • Section 2: Skills and confidence in providing palliative care and advance care planning.

Complete this process annually, as learning and development needs will change.

>> Download ELDAC Personal Learning Assessment Form (215kb pdf)

Develop a personal learning plan (see below) based on the assessment items where you have scored 1 in each section and what you would like to focus on for the next 12 months. There is a section in the plan for knowledge priority areas and a section for skills and confidence focus areas. This because you may have identified you have the knowledge on a topic, but do not have the skill or the confidence to undertake this process. For example, you know the principles of advance care planning, but need more confidence in starting the conversation with a person about making an advance care plan.

The Learning Assessment and Learning Plan can used to discuss with your supervisor how to improve your knowledge, skills and confidence in palliative care and advance care planning.

ELDAC Personal Learning Plan

Remember to make a plan that is achievable. You can use the Learning Assessment and Learning Plan to discuss with your supervisor how you could improve your knowledge, skills and confidence in palliative care and advance care planning. Once you have created your learning plan and identified your learning needs and areas where further training is required, browse the links provided in this section on various types of education and resources recommended by ELDAC.

>> Download ELDAC Personal Learning Plan Form (487kb pdf)

Other ways to gain experience

Registered nurses or allied health professionals

CareSearch has gathered a comprehensive list of Australian universities and organisations that offer postgraduate programs in palliative care.

Conferences

Check out CareSearch’s comprehensive listing of conferences and events being held nationally and internationally.

Short courses and workshops

See the list compiled by CareSearch of the short courses and workshops available for the year and those that have ongoing enrolment.

Clinical experiences

The Program of Experience in the Palliative Approach (PEPA) program provides an opportunity to undertake an observational placement of 2-5 days in a specialist palliative care inpatient, community- or hospital-based consultancy setting. Financial assistance can be provided to the employee and employer. Participants are supported to transfer learning into practice. Further information can be found on the PEPA website.