End of Life Care Pathways in Use in Australia
The majority of end of life care pathways and integrated care pathways in use throughout Victoria are approved modifications of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) or adaptations of integrated care pathways.
The LCP was developed by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool to standardise the quality of care of the dying [7]. The LCP specifically targets 18 domains of care and provides a prescriptive template to guide care in both hospice and non-hospice settings [7]. The LCP is the most internationally recognised and widely used pathway and has been implemented at sites in 17 countries.
Within Australia a number of service providers have developed setting-specific end of life care pathways. Access to information regarding examples of currently used end of life care pathways in Australia can be found below:
- The Liverpool End of Life Care Pathway: end of life care
- St Vincent’s End of Life Care Pathway: approved modified LCP, non-specific inpatient and hospice end of life care plan
- Western & Central Melbourne Integrated Cancer Service (WCMICS) Specific End of Life Care Pathway Project: approved modified LCP, oncology inpatient-specific pilot project being introduced across Western and Central Melbourne hospitals (the Royal Melbourne, the Western Hospital, the Royal Women’s and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre)
- End of Life Care Pathways in Western Australia: a multi-centre pilot
- Pathway for Improving the Care of the Dying (PICD): inpatient, non-specific
- Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) Palliative Care Clinical Pathway – general and end of life
- End of Life Care Pathways for Residential Aged Care Facilities: approved modified LCP, residential aged care.
