About Barwon South Western Region Palliative Care
Barwon South Western Region Palliative Care Consortium is committed to ensuring people with life-threatening illnesses, their families and carers have access to quality palliative care and support delivered in a co-ordinated, respectful manner that meets their needs.
Who we are
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 region we cover includes the local government areas of Colac Otway, Corangamite, Glenelg, Moyne, Queenscliff, Southern Grampians, Surf Coast, City of Greater Geelong, City of 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 their quality of life.
Our role
One of eight regional Palliative Care Consortia across Victoria, the consortium strives to facilitate palliative care’s continuing development and improvement across the Barwon South Western Region within the Department of Health and Human Services End of Life and Palliative Care Framework released in July 2016 which replaced the Strengthening Palliative Care Policy 2011 – 2015.
The Framework requires the healthcare, human services, social and community sectors to connect and work together to develop innovative new strategies to deliver care.
The Framework 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.
Consortium function in implementing the End of Life and Palliative Care Framework is to equip staff and ensure our culture supports staff in the delivery of high quality end of life and palliative care, including bereavement support and staff well-being 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
- strengthening specialist palliative care
The BSW Regional Palliative Care 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 he Service Delivery Framework
- Communication and capacity building
- Governance
- Quality & risk management
- Aligning 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 program, palliative-aged care nurses to run a link nurse program and PERM, our regional palliative care electronic clinical patient record system.
Contact the consortium if you need more information.