Eldercare is a not for profit residential aged care provider operating in South Australia with 1200 beds across 13 sites. Eldercare undertook a project named Hospice in the RACF in 2022/23. This project was funded through the South Australian and Commonwealth Governments under the Comprehensive Palliative Care in Aged Care Project.
As part of this project Eldercare ran a palliative care traineeship program for certificate 3 personal care workers in partnership with an RTO. The palliative care traineeship program is an innovative model of training future palliative care workers and is linked to Eldercare's unique model of aged care. 
Learnings from this program showed that successful implementation of a specialist traineeship program is complex, requiring strong collaboration and coordination between various organisations  including external training organisations, government and general practitioners as well as different aged care homes and individuals within the organisation. 
Experience from the Eldercare program showed that the right expectations of the trainees should be set from the early stage of advertising the program through to recruitment, induction, training and mentoring.  The program also revealed that supervision/mentoring is the core component of such a model.  
Investment in the selection and training of mentors and a formal structure in place to support mentors, individual and group mentoring, debriefing sessions and feedback process is critical to the success of this type of training program.  Without proper training and support system, it is not realistic to expect additional an mentoring role from already busy aged care staff which, in turn, negatively impact on trainees’ experience. 
The presentation will give an overview of the learnings from the traineeship program from Eldercare's perspective, from the formal evaluation undertaken by Flinders University and from a few trainees themselves through very short films in which they describe their experiences.