NSW trends in palliative care patient care outcomes. Improvements over time: where to from here?

[extract] Within a changing health care system it is vital for palliative care services to be able to demonstrate what we do over time. The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) has been a key driver in providing evidence based patient care outcomes. This is being achieved through, the use of standardised clinical assessment tools to measure patient outcomes, patient/carer periodic surveys, and benchmarking workshops. Currently in Australia there are 115 palliative care services participating in PCOC, of these, 23 are NSW inpatient services.