ProSeek: Finding what you need, sharing what you are doing

A blog post by Professor Jennifer Tieman, Flinders University and Technology and Innovation Lead, ELDAC

Each year, new research and projects are commenced or completed that could provide useful knowledge and resources for aged care to help them to solve palliative care or advance care planning issues. Being able to locate these resources has been challenging, as there was no one-stop platform that allowed users to search and identify projects and products of palliative care research and activities conducted across Australia. Aged care workers, service providers and decision-makers may not realise useful information already exists that could help them in planning and decision-making. ELDAC has created a new database of palliative care projects conducted in Australia, called ProSeek, to make finding project and research information easier.

ProSeek is a database of projects and research studies. It is a place where researchers and aged care staff can share their studies and findings with others in the community. This is particularly important in a period of change and reform, where knowing what people have tested and what worked can provide shortcut solutions for stretched services.

To develop the ProSeek database, the Technology and Innovation Team at Flinders University were guided by a Technical Reference Group (TRG). The concept design, specification, build and testing were completed in 2020-21. First, we completed an environmental scan of relevant Australian resources, projects, and research activities at the state and national level to determine what information fields we needed to capture. Then we developed a list of resource inclusion criteria, which were discussed with the TRG. The finalised list of items was described as the Resource Upload Field List, and this formed the basis for the technical development of the database prototype. User testing of the prototype was completed before the database was made live. The project submission application and search functionality were uploaded to ELDAC and released through the ELDAC website. Users can now access the ProSeek database and provide feedback on its usefulness.

We are now working with the aged care sector and the palliative care community to identify relevant Australian projects and research studies focused on palliative care and end-of-life care which could be included in ProSeek. We are intending to add the following types of resources to the ProSeek database:

• Documents outlining policy and/or legislation
• Position papers from peak bodies or organisations
• Websites/webpages with embedded resources
• Education resources including online modules and courses
• Resources including documents, apps, scales, tools, and toolkits
• Theses
• Current or recently completed research projects

You can submit your project at the ProSeek submission page for review and publication by the ELDAC team, or you can email project information to eldac.project@flinders.edu.au. We are looking forward to reading your submissions and sharing them with the community. 

 

 

Professor Jennifer Tieman, Flinders University and Technology and Innovation Lead at ELDAC