Abstract

NSAP is a quality improvement program available for all specialist palliative care services across Australia. It enables services to engage in continuous quality improvement through self assessment against the Palliative Care Australia standards for providing quality palliative care for all Australians, action plan development and implementation, as well as peer mentorship.

This presentation will provide an analysis of the self assessment reports received prior to 30 June, 2010, a total of 69 reports. Considering the overall priority for improvement data and the 957 action items provided by these reports, it is clear that national priorities are focused on three key areas:

1. Skill development in continuous quality improvement

2. Care planning (incorporating assessment)

3. Support for carers.

This analysis foreshadows a real opportunity to develop processes for working collaboratively across these core areas for improvement based on an emerging understanding of the needs of the sector, in addition to supporting system level change to enable improvement in palliative care for patients and their families/carers. NSAP has commenced a project focusing on two of the above key areas (skill development in continuous quality improvement and care planning) as a starting point. In addition to this, further analysis of data available to NSAP will continue as the aggregated data set grows with ongoing submission of self assessments.