Palliative Aged Care Consultancy Service (PACCS)

PACCS provides an intergrated model of care to residents of residential aged care facilities and those people living in their own home.

Jane Mahony and her team of specialist palliative nurses have been providing specialist palliative consultancy since 2010. The service focuses on engaging with residents and patients and their families, nursing and care staff and GPs, early and routinely. The service the team provides ensures residents/patients, their family and staff have access, on a minimum weekly basis, to best practice palliative care to manage the complexities of life limiting illnesses and ageing with multiple comorbidities.

Clinical outcomes include:

• increase in appropriate referrals
• increase in advance care planning and palliative case conferencing
• reduction in suffering from untreated symptoms
• increase in GP, resident and family confidence that the care provided supports the individual in their goals of care

and ultimately

• reduces requests for residents to be transferred to acute facilities and therefore reduction in hospital death rate.

Services:

• Individual Resident Consults and Assessments
• Pain and Symptom Management
• Palliative Care/Advance Care Planning
• Facilitation of Case Conferencing
• Liaison with the Resident's General Practitioner
• Policy and Procedure Development
• Accreditation support
• Maximising ACFI funding
• Family support
• Mentoring
• Knowledge sharing
• Quality Assurance
• Advocacy.