Palliative Care and Advance Care Planning in general practice

A training package for Practice Nurses

Centre: CHSD

Funder: HammondCare Health and Hospital

Start year: 2016

End year: 2020

Overview: Advance is a national, federally funded program designed to introduce advance care planning into general practices in a sensitive and routine way. It will also help identify people who may benefit from a thorough assessment of their supportive care needs and consideration of early referral to palliative care. HammondCare invited Associate Professor Virginia Lewis to offer external evaluation advice to the Advance project. As an external evaluator, Virginia has provided the project with:

• Assistance with choosing an appropriate evaluation framework.
• Advice and input regarding draft study design, draft evaluation protocol, draft ethics application documents, draft surveys, and draft qualitative interview questions.

• Advice and input regarding the qualitative and quantitative analysis (to be conducted by the evaluation officer).
• An independent review of the evaluation process.

As a consequence of this working relationship, Virginia is now a CI on a newly funded project with HammondCare and other collaborators from the University of Sydney, Flinders University (CareSearch), Austin Health, University of Queensland, University of Technology Sydney, and University of Wollongong. It will include:

• Consultation with relevant health professional bodies to identify the highest priority groups of clinicians for the new program and to tailor the resources and training for their specific needs.
• Development of online learning resources for the new groups of clinicians.
• Individual tele-mentoring for participating clinicians from across Australia.
• Grants and train-the-trainer support for champion networks to deliver face-to-face training and to support implementation of the model into clinical practice.

Evaluation of the program, Australian Government Department of Health, National Palliative Care Project. The Advance Project: Initiating palliative care and advance care planning through training and resources for primary and chronic/complex care clinicians.

Team members (internal/external): Virginia Lewis