Palliative care in the Barwon South Western Region of Victoria
The Barwon South Western Region Palliative Care Consortium (BSWRPCC) is an alliance of the six healthcare services in the region funded by the Victorian Department of Health & Human Services to provide specialist palliative care. Palliative care consortia undertake palliative care planning and coordinate palliative care services in each Victorian Department of Health & Human Services region.
The region includes the regional cities of Geelong, Warrnambool, Colac, Portland and Hamilton. The providers are: Barwon Health, Bellarine Community Health, Colac Area Health, Portland District Health, South West Healthcare, and Western District Health Service and cover the local government areas of Colac Otway, Corangamite, Glenelg, Moyne, Queenscliffe, Southern Grampians, Surf Coast, Greater Geelong, Warrnambool and South East Golden Plains.
What is palliative care?
Palliative care aims to support people living with a terminal illness, it focuses on supporting the person who has the illness as well as their family and friends.
Palliative care concentrates on a person’s quality of life by managing symptoms, and meeting a person’s social, emotional and spiritual needs. It also provides advice, support and education to family and friends.
The World Health Organisation’s palliative care definition is:
“An approach that improves the quality of life of individuals and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual needs.”
Our role
One of eight regional palliative care consortia across Victoria, the BSWRPC Consortium strives to facilitate palliative care’s continuing development and improvement across the Barwon South Western Region within the Department of Health’s End of Life and Palliative Care Framework released in July 2016, replacing the Strengthening Palliative Care Policy (2011-2015).
The Framework requires that the healthcare, human services, social and community sectors connect and work together to develop innovative new strategies to deliver care.
The Framework also emphasises a person-centred approach for delivering care according to people’s preferences and goals. It focuses on understanding what matters to people who are dying and their families. It outlines plans to redesign our services to be effective, with a focus on delivering care being everybody’s responsibility in the healthcare system as part of an integrated service.
The Consortium’s role in implementing the End of Life and Palliative Care Framework is to equip staff and ensure our staff are supported in the delivery of high quality end of life and palliative care, including bereavement support and staff wellbeing programs.
To achieve this, the framework will deliver actions on five priorities:
- Delivering person-centred services;
- Engaging communities, embracing diversity;
- Coordinating and integrating services;
- Making quality end of life and palliative care everyone’s responsibility; and
- Strengthening specialist palliative care.
The BSWRPC Consortium has the following roles:
- Regional planning;
- Coordination of palliative care service provision in the region;
- Advice to the department about priorities for future service development and funding in the region;
- Implementation of the Service Delivery Framework;
- Communication and capacity building;
- Governance;
- Quality and risk management; and
- Aligning the regional plan with departmental direction.