Palliative care in the Barwon South Western Region Victoria
The Barwon South Western Region Palliative Care Consortium (BSWRPC Consortium) is an alliance of the six healthcare services in the region funded 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.
Established in 1998, the consortium is a coalition of six specialist palliative care providers across Victoria’s Barwon South Western Region, which 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. The consortium also includes the regional Department of Health.
The regions we cover include the local government areas of Colac Otway, Corangamite, Glenelg, Moyne, Queenscliffe, Southern Grampians, Surf Coast, Greater Geelong, Warrnambool and South East Golden Plains.
The consortium’s health service members provide innovative and individually tailored palliative care services for clients within their own homes, hospitals, aged-care facilities and hospices. Delivered by a multi-disciplinary team, the holistic care and support encompasses the client, their family and carers and focuses on improving quality of life.
What is palliative care?
Palliative care is delivered by a multi-disciplinary team of professionals that can include specialist doctors, nurses, GPs, allied health professionals, grief counsellors, and pastoral care workers. Delivered in the patient’s own home or in hospital, aged-care and hospice settings, the patient takes on a key role in deciding and managing their care.
Communication is vital and the palliative care team is committed to ensuring the patient and their carers are knowledgeable about their care so they can make well-informed choices and get the most out of every day.
Palliative care embraces a holistic approach and is open to people of all ages and at all stages of their life-threatening illness. It covers pain and symptom management, keeping the patient as pain-free and comfortable as possible, and also provides a wide range of emotional support that encompasses not just the client but their family and carers too.
Many people receive palliative care in the comfort and familiarity of their own homes, which helps to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Specialist palliative care is available for people who experience complex problems during the progression of their life-limiting illness.
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.
Our programs
The consortium supports a range of programs across Victoria’s Barwon South Western Region. These are an important part of the comprehensive palliative and hospice care support network of services available to residents in the region. They include:
- a regional after-hours triage service; and
- palliative-aged care nurses to run a link nurse program.