Missing out on palliative care
Concern has emerged as a result of a new report which reveals one in 18 residential aged care residents are identified as needing palliative care, despite previous research indicating the proportion of people dying in aged care is increasing.
Professor Patsy Yates, president of Palliative Care Australia, is concerned the majority of Australians – particularly older Australians – who need palliative care services are not receiving them.
Although welcoming the new report released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Palliative Care Australia (PCA) is concerned the majority of Australians who need palliative care services are not receiving them.
The AIHW report shows just 20% of people who died in 2011-12 was receiving palliative care.
According to Professor Patsy Yates, president of PCA, although this doesn’t include those who had access to palliative care and died at home, comparing this figure to the latest research which estimates anywhere between 50% to 90% of people would benefit from access to palliative care services, it is clear Australia is “falling well short of what is required”.
It is also clear that palliative care admissions are continuing to rise, from 38,000 in 2001–02 to 57,600 in 2011–12, an increase of 52%. Fifty one per cent of people who died in 2011–12 did so in hospital.
“This rise in hospital admissions is really at odds with what we hear from the community. Most people want to be supported to die at home. We must see a shift in policy and funding support to make this a reality,” Professor Yates says.
To support this, Professor Yates calls for a comprehensive awareness raising campaign to encourage people to talk about the care they would like at the end of their life, inform them of the choices available and address associated stigma and misconceptions.
“We also need a nationally consistent approach to advance care planning legislation to provide confidence that their wishes will be met,” she adds.
The report also indicates a need to promote and embed the benefits of and practice of palliative care for people across the range of chronic diseases.
Nearly 60% of palliative care admissions who died had a diagnosis of cancer, yet dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, despite being the third leading causes of death in Australia, do not feature in the palliative care admissions data in the report.
Professor Yates says a commitment to developing a Palliative Care Workforce Strategy, which embeds palliative care into the education and training of all health professionals across their careers, is imperative.
“The AIHW reports make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the delivery of palliative care in Australia, however, the report mentions a number of times that data quality issues were a problem in determining definitive numbers,” she says.
“It is vital that we have more comprehensive data, including from community palliative care. In order to better prepare for the future, PCA calls for the development and implementation a comprehensive national palliative care data collection set.”
Read the full AIHW Palliative Care Services in Australia 2014 report.
