Introduction

Palliative Care Needs Rounds were developed in Australia, and robustly tested in both Australia and the UK. The approach involves a specialist palliative care clinician working with care home staff to identify and plan for the palliative care needs of residents to ensure they experience best quality life and death. Needs Rounds demonstrate positive outcomes for residents, staff and relatives and are a proactive model of care. 

To date, little hands-on training has been provided to clinicians wishing to introduce this model to their service.

Aims: To give workshop participants (i) the opportunity to use Needs Rounds, (ii) to determine how they can be used in their workplace, (iii) to learn about adaptations and outcomes of Needs Rounds in Australia and internationally. 

 Key learning outcomes

1.     To confidently lead a Needs Rounds meeting 

2.     To understand what’s required to achieve better palliative care outcomes for care home residents, families and staff

3.     To reflect on what it feels like to participate in a Needs Round

4.     To determine how Needs Rounds could be used in their workplace, considering their local context and desired outcomes.

 

Workshop approach

The primary approach will be through simulated Needs Rounds using fictionalised case examples. Workshop participants will adopt the roles of: specialist palliative care staff, care home staff, or observers. Workshop facilitators will provide coaching and mentoring to participants, and augment learning by explicitly labelling process and content as they are enacted in the simulation. Reflexive debriefing will be used after each simulation to encourage engagement with the learning and how it can be applied in participants’ workplaces. 

Participants will receive take-home implementation resources. Handouts will also describe some of the adaptations used in Needs Rounds, and other accessible resources to enable participants to continue their learning and use after the conference.