Table 3 Examples of evidence gaps and research priorities
Research priority area | Description | Responses |
|---|---|---|
Death and dying | Mapping death literacy and the ‘death journey’ | Research is needed to uncover what death literacy looks like. If we have a greater understanding it helps advocate for family, friends and community, and that could be quite powerful for then impacting on policy change. |
Care models | Community care, compassionate communities, virtual hospitals and the role of nurse practitioners in aged care and co-designing | I think that there is going to be a huge political driver for this kind of virtual hospital. If you think about how we’ve moved to working from home, having telehealth consultation, you can see that palliative care is likely to be more virtual. You’ve got to have the consumer voice not only at the table, but really in designing and co-designing. And my hunch is that there’s not enough of that so if they were really wanting to improve equity, then they would be engaging the very disparate ethnic cultural groups in identifying what are their needs and how may they be facilitated implemented to achieve what the different cultural groups were. |
Economic analyses | The need for baseline data to inform program design and processes | Seeing a program go from a concept through to funding and implementation requires a series of approval steps. It is important to have robust economic analysis. This also must include the outcomes - what are we getting per input? For example, how do we determine whether to fund one nurse practitioner, or a social worker with 200 boxes of advanced care directives, or four hours of GP time for each GP in the state? How can we support wise investment decisions? |
Access to palliative care | Access to palliative care for different equity groups. | Priority research areas are country, disability, and complex needs, and understanding that supportive care for other chronic conditions is a problem for palliative care which largely focuses on cancer … We could do models of care in the disability community, which I think is incredibly underdone. Probably there’s some learnings in there too. |