Educators in Aged Care

Educators in aged care have a vital role in building the knowledge, skills and competencies of their fellow professionals in delivering palliative care. In addition, aged care professionals need to help patients, families and carers better understand death and dying, and end-of-life care.

Educators may be professional trainers, aged care staff providing in-house education or health professionals assisting with specific clinical training.

The following resources are intended to support educators in:

identifying and meeting their own professional development needs, and
accessing resources that can help facilitate the upskilling of staff / students / team members / colleagues in aged care and palliative care.

Finding palliative care education resources

As an educator, once you have a strong knowledge base regarding what you need to enable your students and/or colleagues to know and do in order to provide good palliative care and end-of-life care, the following resources can help you in your education efforts.

The palliAGED series of introductory modules on aged care and the Introduction Modules Manual can be used with staff who are new to aged care and/or palliative care as part of staff induction.
The PaCE Aged Care directory helps you find learning and teaching resources to support the development of specific palliative care capabilities.
The Educator Hub offered by the Palliative Care Education and Training Collaborative provides educator webinars and educator eLearning modules for you to use to optimise your teaching practice.
PalliBytes offers microlearning activities that may be useful for staff training purposes – different learning pathways are available.

The need for palliative care education and training resources

The ELDAC Care Model provides a way of thinking about issues that need to be considered in supporting aged care staff to plan and deliver palliative care. Each section includes resources.
The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards highlight palliative care in Standard Clinical Care Outcome 5.7 Palliative care and end-of-life care.
Palliative Care Australia includes information on the National Palliative Care Standards and detail on the National Palliative Care Projects.
The Australian Government has also developed toolkits intended to help communicate the importance of upskilling in palliative care. These may also help you communicate your teaching and learning plans to your staff / team members.

Embedding advance care planning and palliative care

Aged care staff can use the ELDAC Personal Learning Assessment form (658kb pdf) to rate their knowledge, skills and confidence in palliative care and advance care planning, and then create their own learning plan (774kb pdf).
Advance Care Planning Australia provide a framework for educators to embed advance care planning into their curriculum.
Palliative Care Curriculum for undergraduates (PCC4U) provides resources for undergraduate / entry-to-practice curriculums on palliative care.
PEPA / IPEPA placements or workshops which focus on palliative care and aged care can be organised for your staff or workplace.

Reform changes

Educators and trainers need to be aware of the policy changes affecting aged care introduced in 2025 including the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, a human rights-based Aged Care Act and the Support at Home program. You can find information about these on the Aged Care Safety and Quality Commission’s Reform changes for workers web page.