Palliative Care

Palliative care is care that helps people live their life as fully and comfortably as possible when living with a life-limiting or terminal illness. Palliative care may continue for an extended period of time and aims to support physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs.

This care is given in our Care Communities by our clinical care team supported by a general practitioner or a specialist multi-disciplinary Palliative Care Team who work together to meet your physical and emotional needs.

Talking about end-of-life and palliative care can be difficult but starting the conversation early is important. Advance Care Planning involves thinking about, discussing and documenting the type of care you would like to receive as you approach the later stages of life. We’ll support you and your family in these discussions and ensure that your wishes are clearly understood.

We believe care should be deeply personal and tailored to meet our residents’ physical and emotional needs. When you decide on a care plan early, you’ll help to ensure your loved one’s wishes are clearly understood so that they live well right to the end of their life.

End-of-life care is the care provided in the last few hours, days or weeks of life.

Palliative care and end-of-life care can be provided in our Care Communities by our clinical care team supported by a general practitioner or a specialist multi-disciplinary Palliative Care Team who work together to meet your physical and emotional needs.

Our team at Norah Head Care Community went above and beyond to support one of our residents Norma and her family with end-of-life care, tailoring a care plan that respected Norma and her family’s wishes.

In Norma’s final days, her room was dimly lit to create a soothing environment. As per Norma’s request, our team played her favourite music; and in her moments of awareness, she would sing along, joined by everyone present in the room. Just as Norma wished, her daughter was by her side as she peacefully passed away. Our team did a wonderful job in making sure Norma’s last moments were full of love, laughter and absolute joy.

Yes. In our Palliative Care Program we're delivering initiatives centred around three strategic areas to ensure our residents have access to high quality palliative and end-of-life care.

This includes:

• Palliative Care education and training of our team with a series of one hour or one day programs.
• Implementing a Champion model in which team members are selected to be a Palliative Care Champion, and help to improve palliative care practices in their Care Community and embed those as “business as usual.”
• Proactive discussions with specialist Palliative Care Services in which our Care Community leaders discuss improvement work and the type of work that can be done together.