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CareSearch has launched a national campaign designed to increase community awareness of palliative care as well as highlighting a host of free resources and information anyone can access.

The Part of Life campaign encourages all Australians to learn, care, and plan for death and dying.

The campaign launch follows significant work by CareSearch and its partners to assist health professionals and community members with access to quality information.

'Death and dying will affect all of us. It’s a part of life. And that means everyone has a role to play in palliative care,' CareSearch Director Professor Jennifer Tieman said.

'CareSearch provides evidence, information, and practical palliative care resources for everyone involved in providing care or supporting people at the end of life.'

Under the National Palliative Care Strategy, six guiding principles have been identified as fundamental to ensure that all people experience the palliative care they need.

The CareSearch Part of Life campaign therefore highlights six important elements of palliative care, including that palliative care is person-centred care; that care is accessible; and that everyone has a role.

'What we are hoping to achieve through this campaign is two-fold; we want to further support health professionals through easy access to quality information and we also want to lift community literacy as a way to encourage advance planning,' Professor Tieman said.

To explore the Part of Life campaign, please visit www.caresearch.com.au/partoflife.

Read our blog and media release.

Dying2Learn is an online course that aims to enable Australians to be more comfortable talking about death and dying, understand what shapes our views and attitudes, and be confident when addressing issues that will affect us all at the end-of-life. In 2020 Dying2Learn will cover the topics:

• How we engage with death and dying (week 1)
• Representations of death and dying (week 2)
• What will we die of? How will we die? (week 3)
• Dying in a digital age (week 4)
• Final reflections (week 5)

This year, Dying2Learn will run from 05 October to 02 November. The course is free and open to everyone in Australia. Enrolment ends 09 October, 2020.

CareSearch developed and manages palliAGED to provide support in palliative care for the aged care sector. In July a new and final topic was released, Psychosocial Care. This sits at the core of palliative care and connects to many of the 37 topics already available on the palliAGED website. In practice, awareness of and attendance to psychosocial support should be a part of all aspects of palliative care. You can also read the blog by CareSearch staff members Susan Gravier and Robyn Dutschke on this release.

For more than ten years, the Palliative Approach (PA) Toolkit has supported residential aged care facilities to implement a comprehensive, evidence-based, person-centred, and sustainable approach to palliative care. For the last five years access to this resource has been supported through the CareSearch website. Since its release in 2009, there have been many changes to the evidence base and palliAGED and End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC) now support the aged care sector. The PA Toolkit was retired on 30 June 2020 after the completion of a content transition plan. You can find more information and alternative resources here.