Working together to improve end of life care for older Australians

A guest blog post from Rebecca Moore, Diana Harrison, and Jennifer Gavin, ELDAC Facilitators from Queensland University of Technology

Do you want to improve advance care planning and palliative care services given to older people in your care?

Could you achieve these goals by working in partnership with other organisations?

Would you like help to access other services for support in caring for older people at the end of life?
 
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions, the ELDAC ‘Working Together’ toolkit and/or the ELDAC team of facilitators may assist you. The toolkit and facilitators program have been created to help you work with other service providers that can strengthen the quality of care you provide at end of life.

Four out of five older people in Australia use aged care services before their death, they often suffer from multiple, complex illnesses and have high levels of dependency toward the end of life.  Aged, palliative and primary care services need to be of the highest quality to ensure optimal outcomes for older people at end of life, and working together is one way to strengthen the care you provide.

ELDAC’s facilitators provide a free service to both community and residential aged care services. Their aim is to assist and support your service to:

• Develop, implement and sustain palliative care and advance care planning objectives
• Build capacity to provide care for older people nearing the end of life
• Develop and/or strengthen linkages your service has with other care providers

The ELDAC Working Together toolkit is a free resource available online to support this linkage process and contains a series of case studies illustrating the benefits of using these linkage strategies for aged care services and their clients.

Both the ‘Working Together’ toolkit and the ELDAC facilitators use evidence-based resources, linkage strategies, partnering and continuous quality improvement processes.  Many of the goals and objectives your organisation has may be easier to achieve with the support of the facilitators, who will work on a service-by-service basis to support goals relevant to each organisation.

Please visit the Partnering Sites webpage for further information about the benefits of working with an ELDAC facilitator, or to register your interest. Alternatively, please email us on eldacteam1@qut.edu.au and a facilitator will contact you.





Rebecca Moore, ELDAC Facilitator, Queensland University of Technology






Diana Harrison, ELDAC Facilitator, Queensland University of Technology






Jennifer Gavin, ELDAC Facilitator, Queensland University of Technology