How the ELDAC Digital Dashboard can help you to manage palliative and end of life care
A guest blog post by Larissa Gear, Regional Residential Manager, Carinity
Palliative and end-of-life care are extremely important aspects of the services that residential aged care facilities provide to aged care residents. Moving into a residential aged care facility is a big change for residents and their families. These residents often experience some complex and chronic and life-limiting health conditions, which makes providing quality palliative and end-of-life care an important part of the service residential aged care facilities provide.
Palliative care and end-of-life care look very different for each of our residents. For this reason, we aim to partner with our residents and their representatives to ensure they are experiencing their life and end of life as they had envisioned. This involves completing case conferences and collaborating with external palliative care providers or pain management experts and ensuring that this information is translated into the resident’s wellbeing plan so that staff have a record of what is meaningful to each resident.
One way that we organise our end-of-life care is through the ELDAC Digital Dashboard, a system that allows us to track key processes and indicators relevant to palliative and end-of-life caregiving. The dashboard gives us the opportunity to better manage our palliative and end-of-life care information. It’s important that we have information on our residents close to hand, that it’s accurate, and that the data is available in real-time. The dashboard shows us specific data in relation to the age of residents when they come into our service, the age of a resident when they commence palliative or end-of-life care. It also provides us key information on the relevant documentation such as whether a resident has been commenced on an End-of-Life Pathway, whether they have had an End-of-Life Assessment, whether they’ve had a pain chart completed or a pain assessment carried out. It also shows whether a medical practitioner has been consulted.
The Digital Dashboard was integrated at Carinity in mid-2020, followed by our 11 sites taking part in the ELDAC Digital Dashboard Implementation Trial from August to December 2020. While the dashboard trial concluded in December 2020, the dashboard continues to be used across all our sites, particularly by our clinical staff, registered nurses and enrolled nurses, our clinical nurse consultants, and our residential managers. It is accessible to each nurse on their computers in their working stations and gives them a real-time view of where each resident is at their palliative and end of life phase, without having to go to multiple sources to find that information. The dashboard also tells the nurses when a resident’s documentation might have any gaps or where it has been completed in full. The dashboard has been developed and reviewed to ensure the information our staff require to provide high-quality palliative and end-of-life care is there for them.
Caring for our residents is all about helping them to live with purpose and what provides meaning to them. Providing palliative and end-of-life care is a big responsibility for us as clinicians and service providers, and we need to make sure that our residents receive the kind of palliative and end-of-life care that aligns with their wishes and choices. The dashboard provides us with efficiencies to make sure that we’ve covered off every aspect of that journey for our residents. I would highly recommend ELDAC to other aged care services and I would also recommend use of the ELDAC Digital Dashboard.
Find out more about the ELDAC Digital Dashboard or watch Carinity’s series of video case stories.
Larissa Gear, Regional Residential Manager, Carinity