Consider these practice areas within your organisation. Do you need to make changes in the way these are addressed?
- Advance care planning
- Recognising end-of-life care
- Assessing palliative care needs
- Providing palliative care
- Working together
- Responding to deterioration
- Managing dying
- Bereavement
These are areas that you can effect change in through successful and sustainable partnerships when providing palliative care and advance care planning for older people. Depending on your particular settings of care, a number of ELDAC Toolkits may address these particular areas.
The Toolkit provides you with resources and links to other sites where you can find out more about working together to improve palliative care and advance care planning for older persons. Ideally, it can be used in conjunction with other ELDAC Toolkits although it can be used as a stand-alone resource.
When aged care providers and palliative care services work together, you can achieve:
- Fewer avoidable presentations to Emergency Departments during care at the end of life
- Shorter length of stay in hospital when residents/clients are admitted
- Improved quality of palliative care for older persons near the end of life in their usual place of residence
- Increased knowledge, skills and confidence in clinical care staff in providing palliative care
The ELDAC Working Together Toolkit has been created to help middle and upper level managers create partnerships between aged, primary and palliative care services. It takes you through the processes to establish and implement effective and sustainable partnerships between service providers.
Before you begin to work your way through this Toolkit, we recommend that you take a little time to understand the fundamental principles and practices of partnership development. The elements of the Working Together Toolkit are underpinned by elements of the partnering cycle. Many elements of partnering will be familiar already. You can see that the cycle is made up of four segments, each with its own components that step you through the information you need to establish and implement effective and sustainable partnerships between service providers.
Remember, whilst every partnership is unique, there is a great deal of similarity in how organisations work together in partnerships. The cycle shown here provides some guidance but does not represent a clear cut process – your path through these segments will rarely follow a linear path.

We do recommend, though, that you follow the steps within the Working Together Toolkit to systematically build the collaborations with others to achieve a successful and sustainable partnership when providing palliative care and advance care planning for older people. These steps are not necessarily linear – for example, strategies for evaluation and sustainability do not come at the end of this process; rather they are integrated throughout the whole process.
Working together in partnership is what this toolkit is all about.