Money for home-based palliative care

MORE Northern Tasmanians in rural regions like Deloraine and St Helens will be trained in palliative care home support with the help of Federal Government funding announced this week.

Another nearly 50 new packages of care for palliative care patients in their own homes will also be available across Lyons in the North, North-West and South of the state.

Federal Lyons MP Eric Hutchinson said he was pleased to see more money flowing into Tasmanian rural health following the announcement this week that more than $35 million over three years is being provided to the District Nurses Association to provide in-home palliative care through a new project called hospice@Home.

The new Federal Government funding round will also see Tasmania’s Health and Human Services get $11 million to support and build on the existing specialist palliative care teams across the state.

More than of 340 people have already attended training sessions at various metropolitan and rural sites including Campbell Town, Latrobe, Ulverstone, Scottsdale, Launceston, Burnie and Hobart.

From this week a further 74 people will receive the same training in palliative care support at locations including Deloraine, St Helens and Franklin.

The training is targeted at both health professionals and non-professionals who provide palliative care in the community including general practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, aged care workers, respite carers, community care workers and volunteers.

“As is the case more generally in aged care but specifically in palliative care, coordination and a broader knowledge across service sections is most important,’’ Mr Hutchinson said.

He said that the Federal Government was committed to supporting the provision of evidence based palliative care at the end of life.

It was another example of government funding being directed to often isolated country areas where reliable health services were so badly needed, he said.

Only last month Federal funding started to flow to Community Transport Services Tasmania which will enable the state-wide organisation to provide reliable transport to medical care and domestic support.

The organisation will receive additional recurrent funding of more than $750,000 which will mean it can provide full-time access to Tasmanians across the state to community transport.

Training in best palliative care is being rolled out nationally to staff from residential aged care homes and home care package services as part of this week’s palliative care funding announcement.

In Tasmania, the state’s Association of Hospice and Palliative Care will also receive $2.7 million from this latest funding round to provide vital infrastructure services for care and support services to Tasmanians living with life-limiting illnesses.

The Better Access to Palliative Care program means that the District Nurses Association can deliver about 2000 community based packages of palliative care where they are needed across the state over the three years from this financial year to 2015-16.

Since the pilot program started on December 16 last year, 99 patients and their families have benefited from the service.

Most of the packages have been delivered in the South but there have been 17 delivered in Northern Tasmania and 24 delivered in the North-West.

Federal Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash was in Hobart to announce the new funding.
Federal Lyons MP Eric Hutchinson