The role of ambulance services in reducing the gaps in access to end-of-life care: from conversations to policy

Abstract

Reducing the gap between the need for and access to effective and best practice care at the end-of-life is a goal of the Australian palliative care sector. Largely absent from the suite of plans, strategies and frameworks that map Australia’s path to quality end-of-life care for all patients isPalliatiev CAre Australia the role of ambulance services. Instead, patients’ need for these services tends to be characterized as an undesirable consequence of an under-resourced palliative care sector and no longer necessary when the sector is fully resourced. We hypothesize that one reason for this characterization is that the ambulance and palliative care sectors have fundamentally different perspectives of end-of-life care. We conclude that further if the palliative care sector were to partner with ambulance services, the gap between the need for and access to end-of-life care would be reduced more rapidly and cost effectively.