National report on patient outcomes in palliative care in Australia, January - June 2015

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) is a national program that utilises standardised clinical assessment tools to measure and benchmark patient outcomes in palliative care. Participation in PCOC is voluntary and can assist palliative care service providers to improve practice. This is achieved via the PCOC patient outcome improvement framework which is designed to: * provide clinicians with the tools to systematically assess individual patient experiences using validated clinical assessment tools, * define a common clinical language to streamline communication between palliative care providers, * facilitate the routine collection of national palliative care data to drive quality improvement through reporting and benchmarking, * provide service-to-service benchmarking reports and opportunities to discuss sector results at benchmarking workshops, and * support research using the PCOC longitudinal database (2006-2015).