Background: Community Palliative Care Services (CPCS) in Victoria mostly operate during business hours, Monday to Friday 0800-1700hrs, with some provide evening and/or after-hours short visits. However, care at the end-of-life can be complex and occurs across 24 hours of the day and night. Symptom management and care needs often become more intensified. When home is the preferred site of death is home, the carer role puts extra strain on carers and subjects them to learning new skills at a stressful time and providing 24-hour care, resulting in exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Escalated carer stress can influence the place of choice and inadvertent hospital admissions at the end of life. In the bereavement phase, many carers state that they regret the last hospital admission and would have kept the client at home had they known that the client would die within the next hours or few days.

Objectives:

· To evaluate the effect of overnight nursing respite in preventing hospital transfer at the terminal phase of life.

· To identify resources available to facilitate overnight respite at end-of-life period.

· To identify the challenges for the CPCS to provide overnight nursing respite.

· To provide cost analysis of a Model of Care for end-of-life-care at home that includes provisioning of overnight nursing respite by CPCS.

Method: Retrospective Qualitative research. Data will be collected from CPCS Overnight Respite reports from 2019-2022. With an approval from the Ethics Committee, 100 carers will be randomly selected from the Overnight respite reports and be contacted by CPCS staff. With their consent, carers will be interviewed using a set of questionnaires. The data will be analysed and presented in a report.

Expected outcomes:

· Evidence to support ongoing fundings for overnight nursing respite to clients in their terminal phase of life

· Development of a CSPC Model of Care for end-of-life-care at home that includes provisioning of overnight nursing respite