VET News

Prepare Our Workforce to Support Families on a Palliative Care Journey

Community highlighted that one of the key barriers that mob experience in accessing palliative care and the dignity, self-determination, and healing that it can bring families, is the lack of palliative care knowledge and skills among our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce.  

While palliative care skillsets and knowledge is well established for other health professions, less is known about what skillsets and knowledge are required to best build the capacity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers and practitioners to respond to local palliative care health needs and contexts.

To better understand these training needs, PCC4U held a Roundtable to develop an evidence-based culturally specific palliative care curriculum for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health worker and practitioner training packages.  

Ongoing engagement with peak bodies has been instrumental in reflecting on the Roundtable outcomes to inform a strategy that will bring genuine benefit to building the capacity of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce to deliver palliative care.  In collaboration with the Roundtable attendees, the following action plan was agreed upon:

• Utilise existing partnerships with IPEPA, education providers, jurisdictions, and Aboriginal Health Workers to reach local networks and focus on supporting tailored local activities.
• Couple a grassroots approach with Elders and other respected community members through community champions.
• Co-design and tailor bespoke learning and teaching resources with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to develop agreed capabilities.
• Use multiple channels of engagement including development of specific training resources, integration of content into existing training packages, awareness raising campaigns, webinars and podcasts, and newsletter articles.
• Recognise the scope of PCC4U and IPEPA, and work with Peak Bodies to highlight challenges and opportunities identified for this workforce.
• Partner with local implementation sites to evaluate outcomes.

To date, PCC4U has used the above capabilities to provide feedback to the Skills IQ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker Training Package review and continue to work with stakeholders to develop flexible and culturally-relevant learning and teaching resources for integration in VET Sector training packages.

The PCC4U team welcomes the opportunity and privilege to collaborate with, or receive feedback from, stakeholders, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce and community members to build on this learning journey. If you are interested or have any questions, please contact Kylie or Nicole:

• Kylie Ash, National Project Manager PCC4U k.ash@qut.edu.au or
• Nicole Hewlett, National Indigenous Manager IPEPA nicole.hewlett@qut.edu.au

Date posted Aug 12, 2021