Introduction:

The Mona Vale Hospital Palliative Care Unit (PCU) opened in February 2021 as a 10-bed unit on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. It is run by the Northern Sydney Local Health District (NSLHD). The local community service is the Northern Beaches Community Palliative Care Service (NBCPCS) run by HammondCare. 

Methods:

From the opening of the new PCU, a key focus was on collaboration between the PCU and community services. Two staff specialists worked in the community prior to the PCU opening. Both were involved in the new PCU, one as the medical lead, the second attending the PCU MDT. This meant both regularly attend the MDTs for the PCU and community palliative care. The new PCU was also enrolled in the Palliative Care Outcomes Collaborative (PCOC) to capture data on patient outcomes.

Results:

The PCU has now had over 500 admissions since opening. PCOC collection data for the PCU has had the added benefit of also showing outcomes that demonstrate collaboration between services. The Mona Vale PCU had 47% of admissions direct from community, compared to PCUs across Australia having 28% of admissions direct from community. Length of stay for the Mona Vale PCU remains comparable with other PCUs in Australia. Despite different organisations operationally running the services, shared clinicians and PCOC data have demonstrated improved access for community patients. Particularly for patients at the end of their lives, fewer transfers between services and less use of the acute hospital system is a significant benefit.

Conclusions:

In opening a new PCU, we have found data recording through PCOC to be invaluable for symptom benchmarking, but also to track patient flow and the patient journey across services. We would advocate for new PCUs to collect PCOC data, and to also consider strong collaboration with community palliative care services, including shared senior clinicians in MDTs.

Acknowledgement: Thankyou to PCOC - PCOC is a national palliative care project funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.