© 2007 Australian Family Physician www.afp.org.au

Palliative care focuses on optimising function and comfort for people with progressive life limiting illness.1 It incorporates nursing, medical and allied health staff, therefore making the coordination of services crucial. When communication between health care providers is poor, effort may be duplicated.2,3 Multiprofessional teams provide better palliative care than practitioners working in isolation,4,5 and better coordination of existing services can decrease resource utilisation while still maintaining quality.6 Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) rebates for case conferencing were introduced in Australia in 1999 with the goal of shifting from short term episodic care to longitudinal planning for contingencies.7 Uptake of these case conference rebates has however been poor.8 Case conferencing can provide a funded mechanism to enhance coordination between a person with advanced life limiting illness, their general practitioner and the palliative care team. This was demonstrated in The Palliative Care Trial, a randomised controlled trial (RCT) conducted i