Welcome to Thursdays at 3 our regular series of conversations with people living and working at the end of life. The Aged Care Royal Commission made 12 recommendations pointing to the need for palliative care and dementia care to be better understood and better integrated into aged care services.

Today we hear from three people chipping away at that work through ELDAC – End of Life Directions for Aged Care. Deb Parker, Professor of Aged Care and Dementia Nursing at the University of Technology, Sydney and a key contributor to the ELDAC project. Rebecca Moore from the Queensland University of Technology, and Project Coordinator with ELDAC’s Linkages Program. Ammu Chandran, Clinical Nurse at Sundale at Palmwoods in Queensland. Sundale is a community based, not for profit aged care provider offering care in a range of settings.

Click play to join the conversation and learn of the tools and supports available to do palliative care and dementia care better in aged care. Everything referred to is free and available now via the ELDAC website. You will find more advice, tools, and support with ‘matters of life and death’ at the Palliative Care Australia website where you can also make a donation to support our work.

Thursdays at 3 is back for another round of conversations with people living and working at the end of life. In this episode we hear from someone who has experienced both through the death of her husband Derek in 2019 and today as the CEO of a charity shaping family friendly end of life options. Derek died in August of 2019 after a 23-month battle with aggressive brain cancer – he was just one month short of his 36th birthday. Click play to meet his wife Natasha Welsh and hear of their family's experience and the legacy Natasha is now helping to shape. You will find advice, tools, and support for ‘matters of life and death’ at the Palliative Care Australia website and to support Natasha and the vision she has for Derek’s Place click HERE. Natasha is also a member of PCA’s National Register of Palliative Care Consumers and Carers group and can be engaged for advice through PCA.

With over forty years’ experience in nursing our guest today, Rose Sexton has seen a thing or two! Her passion for palliative and end of life care emerged early, with active interest in Oncology nursing. She completed post graduate studies in palliative care in 2011 and currently works for Northeast Health in Wangaratta, Victoria, in community palliative care. Alongside these health-related passions, she is, at heart, a musician and actress. With Salvation Jane, the four-piece acapella group she founded over 30 years ago, she happily sings about dying and going to heaven! Salvation Jane will play at the National Folk Festival in Canberra over Easter. Rose has also had personal experience in caring for her husband through his end-of-life journey in 2019. Press play to join the conversation.

In this episode we chat to the 2022 Nurse Practitioner of the Year no less – Peter Jenkin.

Peter’s nursing career and commitment to palliative care starts well before last year’s award from the Australian College of Nurse Practitioners.

For 11 years, and only up until recently he was a Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner for Resthaven aged care in South Australia. However, in early 2023, Peter moved to Canberra to take up a position with Calvary Health Care as a Palliative Care Nurse Practitioner working in aged care and at the ACT’s hospice, Clare Holland House.

With aged care and health reform more broadly high on the Government's agenda, Peter has some clear advice on how Nurse Practitioners can be better utilised to deliver quality of life but is strident in his view that “palliative care should be everyone's business.”

In this episode we drop in on regional NSW and the central west town of Orange, where one family’s experience with serious illness has led to a new online business that helps families gather and store memories, plan funeral arrangements and leave a final message for loved ones.

Bec McLaurin’s professional background is in HR but time with her kids and an experience with family illness has led to ‘MyFarvel.com. Bec believes making a plan for the end of life, discussing funeral arrangements, and even leaving a message for loved ones is the work of now – the work of the living, and established MyFarvel to help families do just that.

Bec’s website is one of a range of tools that support end of life conversations and planning, but her families experience highlights the joy and strength that can come from what might a confronting process at first.

Click play to join the conversation.

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In this episode we meet Sallie Fredericks, a Registered Nurse who has worked in palliative care in the Illawarra region of NSW for over thirty years. For the last 10 years Sallie has worked exclusively in aged care as a Palliative Care Clinical Nurse Consultant and is currently a Nurse Educator for a local aged care service. Click play to hear from Sallie as she talks about the need to make palliative care an embedded practise in aged care, the need for palliative care training for nurses, doctors and allied health professionals, and her reflections on what death has taught her about life.

In this episode, we head to regional Queensland, dropping in on Fraser Coast Hospice a community run six bed purpose-built facility, south of Bundaberg at Hervey Bay; K'gari, formally known as Fraser Island, is not far away. As with any community led initiative, there is a lot of heart and soul that went into making Fraser Coast Hospice a reality, not to mention the heart and soul that makes up the support they offer people with life-limiting illness and their family and friends, during the last months, weeks, and days of life. “We create the normality that people have at home – we have the laughter and the tears,” says Director of Care, Alicia Trimingham-Turl. “We have a balance between life and living it till the very end, but also that respect for the loss of very loved people.” Click play to join the conversation.