Palliative care

Palliative Care - Partners in Caring

Central Grampians Palliative Care Services operates from East Grampians Health Service and covers a wide area within the Grampians and Pyrenees Regions.

It is a community based palliative care service offering health care and emotional support to patients and their carers living with life threatening illnesses. The focus is to offer a service that will enhance a person's dignity and independence. Geographically, the service overrides three rural boundaries, these being the Ararat Rural City, Northern Grampians Shire and the Pyrenees Shire. The service is offered 5 days per week, excluding weekends and public holidays, between the hours of 8:30 am to 5:00 pm.

Our aim is to work with patients, their families and carers to achieve a level of care that optimises an individual's quality of life. The service liaises with a variety of local health and community services to assist in personal care, symptom management, home help and transport. Staff work with the local GP, local hospital, Bush Nursing Centre, Occupational Therapist, Physiotherapist, Stoma Therapist, Social Worker, Dietician, Shire Council Workers, Oncology and Radiation Therapist. The service also has access to the Regional Palliative Care Team, working closely with Palliative Care Specialists and Physicians.

Central Grampians Palliative Care also loans a wide variety of equipment and aids to enable independence to be maintained for as long as possible and home nursing care easier. The service is available to any person living in the region who has an incurable illness who requires palliative care, and where palliative care rather than curative treatment is the appropriate care of choice. Patients can self refer, or referrals can be made by anyone involved with the patient in association with the patient's own doctor and the patient's permission.

Over the past 12 months, Central Grampians Palliative Care Services has continued to provide care to those members in the community facing a life threatening and/or terminal illness. It has built on its relationships with many other health providers and Doctors to ensure that the appropriate health care is delivered in a timely and professional manner.

Central Grampians Palliative Care and the West Vic Division of General Practitioners are in their final year of a three year Rural Palliative Care Program. They are one of eight services nation wide participating in this program. It is funded by the Australian Government, Department of Health and Ageing and is being evaluated by Dr Kathy Eager, University of Wollongong. The core activities have been to deliver education to service providers in a variety of settings, enhancing service delivery and reporting to the evaluators. We have had many of our patients register with the program which has assisted us with some valuable data collection. The project finishes in December of this year, and it is anticipated that by its end a national solution to rural palliative care will be developed. Findings will be available by March 2007. A major outcome of this project has been the development of a Community Advisory Group.

As the result of the Department of Human Services policy: Strengthening palliative care: a policy for health and community care providers 2004-2009, Central Grampians Palliative Care is a member of the Grampians Region Palliative Care Consortiumwhich has developed a plan for how services are to be delivered across the region. This consortium meets monthly to work towards the implementation of this plan.