National report on patient outcomes in palliative care in Australia, July - December 2014

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 and meet the Palliative Care Australia (PCA) Standards for Providing Quality Palliative Care for all Australians. This is achieved via the PCOC dataset; a multi-purpose framework designed to: * provide clinicians with an approach to systematically assess individual patient experiences, * define a common clinical language to streamline communication between palliative care providers and * facilitate the routine collection of national palliative care data to drive quality improvement through reporting and benchmarking.