Palliative care: promoting general practice participation

Specialist palliative care services and services involved in the pre-palliative phase of a patient’s disease must accept GPs as an integral part of the care team The number of Australians requiring palliative care is set to rise as the population ages. Although specialist palliative care services now cover most regions of Australia, rationing will be inevitable. Addressing the gaps and shortfalls to enable successful care of dying people will always require general practitioners to shoulder most of this clinical load. Unfortunately, specialist palliative care services report that some GPs are disinclined to continue to care for patients who need palliative care. They also report variability in the palliative care skills GPs possess, and struggle to work out how to support the GP colleagues whose care they perceive to be suboptimal. In 2002, the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing commissioned research to identify the barriers and propose solutions to this perceived problem. The outcome of this exercise provides a series of options for managing the engagement of GPs in palliative care.