Palliative Care in Australia, working out what to say

I have a meeting with a politician next week to discuss my concerns related to Palliative Care in Australia as this issue was the reason I left working in Palliative Care in Australia and I'm not so sure about what to say about it all now.

I've worked as a nurse, a consultant, a project manager for establishing palliative care in North Queensland over the years, a strategic planner, a counsellor, an advocate...but it was my time in the clinical delivering of care that led, eventually, to me leaving this field.

It wasn't because  of the sadness of the area but rather that people were suffering because they were missing out on good palliative care when the had chosen good palliative care over the mayhem and madness of the acute curative system. That 'mass techno-hysteria' of the acute realm.

There will be a national enquiry of some sort into the lack of good palliative care in nursing homes due to recent findings, but I left a palliative care unit because they weren't achieving good palliative care in that 'best of all possible places'.

I'm working now in Mental Health, which is fundamentally much easier than the angst experienced by watching too many, far too many people suffer from pain when they had actually signed up for pain relief in a dedicated palliative care unit.

So I'm not sure what to tell a politician about it all.

Palliative Care is a specialty, a real specialty, that can deliver excellent full pain control within 48 hours...it's a fine and decent and quite noble advanced human care specialty; the fact that over the past few years there is less expertise in it, and less care, and more a clinging to the demands of Oncology Research and Process really offends me as a health professional. I am very distressed that the great gains made in pain control are being discarded now as the focus shifts more to the incorporating or Palliative care into Oncology as a 'supportive care service' rather than what it really is: an excellent science that deals with end of life in a far superior and human way than Oncology can. Oncology, when it comes to end of life IS miserable and IS business. Palliative Care applies to far more people than Oncology has any connection to, as it should. People don't only die of cancer. The applications of palliative care therapies are far more useful and universal than to be contained within Oncology's narrow view. It applies to everyone who chooses it. It's not about cancer, per se. It's about the end of life and making sure that the end of life is decent and reasonable and honourable, no matter what the causal factor. We are mortals, goodness me.

The funding of Palliative Care has meant the Oncology Services have  needed to extort money from it to continue with their miserable business. That's what I think is the truth. By doing so, an advanced human science based upon high skill and compassion is being 'ravaged' for funds to put into therapies in Oncology that don't work and have never worked for folk at the end of their lives. They can ask for palliative care but often what they get is a lot more pain and this really does offend me and upset me.