Free education and training
Free education and training is available to improve the palliative care skills of people who work in health and aged care. Building their skills will help them to feel more confident to care for and communicate with people who have a life-limiting illness.
All health and aged care professionals can access free palliative care education and training.
Watch the video to find out about the benefits of palliative care education and training.
Professor Deborah Parker, Training Provider, End of Life Essentials (EOLE): To know that you can change the end of life care for somebody who's dying is a real privilege. And if you have the skills and the knowledge to actually make that the best experience for both the person dying and the family, that's incredibly rewarding.
Text on screen: Free palliative care is available for anyone who works in primary care or aged care.
Gabrielle Raikiwasa, Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner: It's as important as birth. We need to be talking about death when we're focusing on our healthcare community. Planning, education and having those difficult conversations is an absolute must.
Professor Jennifer Tieman, Training Provider, CareSearch and PalliAGED: One of the things that health professionals can really not recognise is how much reward they will feel in providing palliative care. It is not just a hard set of clinical skills. There are really important skills which are about how we engage with people and that comes through learning skills which they can learn through training. And there are resources that are free to access that health professionals can make use of in providing care for people coming to the end of their life.
Brigitte Karle, Nurse Practitioner: We're going to have an aged care population of 80 and above who we've treated so beautifully with our modern health technology that they are going to be living to 80 or 90 and that's why it's so important to have more and more education.
Dr Caroline Phelan, Training Provider, End of Life Essentials (EOLE): I think all healthcare professionals want to know that we helped somebody come to the end of their life in a good, calm manner where they had all of their care needs met.
Text on screen: Free courses and resources are available to anyone who works in aged care or primary care. Topics include psychosocial and spiritual issues, legal and ethical concerns, identifying and managing symptoms, communication skills and multidisciplinary care.
Text on screen: Find out more at health.gov.au/palliative-care-education.
Communication toolkits for providers
We recently developed communication toolkits for health and aged care providers and organisations. The resources in these toolkits encourage health and aged care workers to undertake palliative care education and training.
Communication toolkits include:
- editorial content
- posters
- videos
- brochures
- text messages
- social media content.
You can also order hard copy brochures and posters.
Download a communication toolkit now.