The Greater Choice for At Home Palliative Care is a Commonwealth-funded pilot program that aims to achieve the following objectives:

1. Improve awareness and access to safe, quality palliative care at home.
2. Support end of life care systems and practices in the community.
3. Reduce unnecessary hospitalisation, enabling the right care, at the right time, in the right place.
4. Generate and use data to support continuous improvement of services across sectors.
5. Use available technologies to support flexible and responsive palliative care at home and afterhours.

Below are some highlights from the Northern Queensland Health Community Connectors Network workshops in 2023.

In 2023 NQPHN funded Palliative Care Queensland to deliver Connecting End-of-Life Care to roll out a series of events for general practitioners in primary care and Residential Aged Care Homes (RACHs) in the Townsville area.

Compassionate Communities are a core part of public health approaches to palliative care, end of life care, and bereavement. It is a whole-of-community approach to improving the end of life experience for people by mobilising local networks, groups, and services to be more conscious, aware, and equipped to offer support.

It is impossible to have hospices built in every suburb, so building Compassionate Communities works to mobilise the community to do their bit for the frail and elderly who live alone, for people with life limiting illnesses, and for people who are grieving.

We want these vulnerable groups to know they are not alone. They are part of our communities and we have the responsibility to support them.

In collaboration with The Groundswell Project Australia, NQPHN conducted a series of Health Community Connectors train-the-trainer workshops and trained more than 300 Health Community Connectors in the northern Queensland region. The train-the-trainer workshops provided education on Advance Care Planning, end of life care, palliative care resources, service mapping, localised end of life needs assessment, and codesign opportunities. To ensure ongoing system integration, specialist palliative care services were also present at the workshops.

Upcoming workshops:

• Health Community Connector workshops are planned in Hughenden and Clermont. To register, please complete this online form.

Registering for the Health Community Connectors train-the-trainer workshop will grant you automatic membership to the Northern Queensland Health Community Connectors Network.

For more information, please contact the NQPHN Older Persons Health and Palliative Care Team.

If you, a family member, or your patient has recently received the challenging diagnosis of a life-limiting illness, you are not alone. Navigating through this uncertain and difficult time can be overwhelming, but Palliative Care Queensland has collated the resources, information, and support needed.

Patient journeys developed by Palliative Care Queensland through funding from NQPHN can be found here.