THE Australian Government has funded a project called caring@home aiming to improve the quality of palliative care service delivery by developing a range of resources for community service providers.
These include health care professionals such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors as well as carers that support people to be cared for and to die at home, if that is their choice.
As a part of the project, NPS MedicineWise has collaborated with caring@home to develop medicines guidelines and a smartphone app called palliMEDS to be used by prescribers to support carers helping to manage breakthrough symptoms safely using subcutaneous medicines.
The palliMEDS app is available to prescribers and pharmacists to familiarise them with eight palliative care medicines endorsed by the Australian & New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine (ANZSPM), for management of common emergent terminal symptoms using the subcutaneous route.
The ANZSPM-endorsed medicines can be used to manage common conditions in home-based palliative care patients in the last few weeks of life, when people often have problems swallowing.
See caringathomeproject.com.au to gain access to the new "Medicine handling guidelines" for healthcare professionals.
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 13 Nov 18
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