Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative (PCOC)
Funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing
Professor Kathy Eagar Centre for Health Service Development (CHSD), University of Wolloongong Professor Kathy Eagar
Professor Samar Aoun Western Australian Centre for Cancer and Palliative Care (WACCPC) Curtin University of Technology
Professor Patsy Yates Institute of Health & Biomedical Innovation (IHBI), QUT
Professor David Currow Department of Palliative and Supportive Services (DPSS) Flinders University
Contact: Professor Patsy Yates Email: p.yates@qut.edu.au
Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative (PCOC) is a national voluntary quality initiative established to assist palliative care services across Australia improve practice and meet the ‘Australian National Standards for the Provision of Palliative Care’.
One of the primary aims of PCOC is to develop and support national benchmarking activities that will contribute to improving palliative care outcomes for patient care. This will be achieved by enabling palliative care services to collect consistent patient related information (a set group of data items) to measure nationally agreed outcomes for palliative care.
Three levels of data being collected to support benchmarking, including patient demographic data, episode of care information, and phase of illness data. At the phase level, assessment of patient’s clinical status is undertaken. The PCOC scientific advisory committee has identified standardised clinical assessment tools to measure agreed palliative care outcomes at the phase level, including Palliative Care Phase Assessment, the Resource Utilisation Grouping (RUG), the Problem Severity Score (PSS), the Symptom Assessment Score (SAS) and the Karnofsky Score.
The analysis of the data to date has provided palliative care services with information about the clinical state of patients and trends the movement of their various stages of illness. Using the phase information as a starting point, an individual service’s data can also be compared with other services to demonstrate how patients in one service score on agreed outcomes when compared to other similar services. Benchmarking meetings are held to enable services to discuss what components of their own service provision and work practices could be improved as a result of utilising resources in different ways.
PCOC data collection is coordinated and managed from a central office, with services supported at the local level by Zone Coordinators whose role is to assist with training and support for data collection, and interpretation and use of the data for quality improvement purposes.
Project Website: http://chsd.uow.edu.au/pcoc/ 