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Abstract
Introduction: Meeting the palliative care needs of children and their families is complex and challenging. For countries such as Australia, whose relatively small paediatric palliative care population is dispersed across a very large geographical area, one challenge is maintaining a skilled workforce in regional, rural, and remote areas, where, when compared to major cities, there are fewer resources, and the workforce is often transient.
Methods:The Quality of Care Collaborative Australia (Qu°CCA) Pop-up Model of Education was used to provide palliative care education to health professionals across three geographical locations and facilities, to facilitate a 2,500-km transfer of a child with complex palliative care needs from a tertiary hospital to the remote family home on Country.
Results:Each Pop-Up provided effective education to facilitate the successful transfer of the child to the next hospital location. Over 18 months, three Pop-Ups occurred. Relational learning and real-time problem solving enabled health professionals to build confidence and capacity to successfully transfer the child from the regional hospital to the remote family home.
Implications: The Qu°CCA Education Pop-up Model is a feasible method to deliver timely access to speciality education. The model can be successfully applied in multiple settings.
Keywords:paediatric, palliative care, integrated health care delivery, learning, rural, education models.
INTRODUCTION
Over the past two decades, specialist paediatric palliative care (SPPC) services have grown globally (Ekberg, Bowers & Bradford 2021). As the need and demand for SPPC continues to grow faster than the specialist workforce, it is imperative that alternative models of SPPC education are explored to ensure that high quality, well-coordinated family-centred care is delivered in the right place at the right time (Mherekumombe 2018).
Compared to the adult population, the paediatric palliative care population is relatively small and often geographically dispersed. The combination of the complexity of the child's condition and intricacies of health systems makes delivery of paediatric palliative care challenging (Bowers et al. 2020). Delivery of such care in areas where there are less resources and fewer service providers can add further complexity (Queensland Health 2019). In Australia, the distance and diverse terrain between major cities, where SPPC services are based, and regional, rural and remote areas where families live is an additional challenge to timely palliative care (Dassah et al. 2018).Children receiving palliative care...