Rural palliative care program national evaluation project: patient and carer experiences

[extract] Palliative care services in Australia are provided across a range of inpatient, outpatient and community settings by a mix of specialist and generalist providers from the public and private sectors. There is little evidence to guide the provision of palliative care in rural areas and few large scale studies that reflect on patient and carer experiences. The national Rural Palliative Care Program was implemented to provide support for palliative care interventions and to develop evidence on their effectiveness. An important part of that evidence is whether patients and their carers actually found the interventions to be helpful to them.