Ensuring access to quality end of life care, including specialist palliative care, remains one of the major challenges to health systems and one we are focused on achieving.
Palliative care can assist with life-limiting illnesses, including:
- Dementia including Alzheimer’s Disease and Vascular Dementia
- Advanced chronic lung disease
- Advanced heart disease, including heart failure
- End-stage kidney failure
- End-stage liver disease
- Cancer
- Degenerative neurological conditions
- Frailty, advanced age and/or multiple chronic medical conditions
Advance Care Planning
Advance Care Planning (ACP) involves a person thinking about and communicating to others how they would like to be treated in the future if they have a condition where they can no longer speak for themselves. This may happen, for example, as a result of stroke, progressive dementia, or becoming unconscious from some form of accident or illness.
Everyone should consider advance care planning, regardless of your age or health. Ideally, you should start planning when you’re healthy – before there’s an urgent need for decisions to be made at a time when you can’t communicate your choices.
It’s never too early, but it can be too late.
Steps you can start now:
Spoiler alert: We all face the end one day.
But planning ahead doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
Here are a few simple steps you can take now to give your loved ones peace of mind.
Prepare a document – or multiple documents. Prepare documents that are relevant to you such as:
- Will
- Power of Attorney
- Enduring Guardian
- Binding Death Nomination
- Advance Care Health Directive
Find out more: Planning for end of life | NSW Government
You can also write an Emotional Will. It’s all about your legacy, the things you want to convey in terms of your thoughts, values and memories. It is not a legal document, and you are free to be creative with it!
Talk with your substitute decision makers, executor and enduring guardian, it’s important they know your plans and how they are involved. Let your family and friends know if they’ve been nominated.
A range of example templates have been created to help guide you in communicating with loved ones about your wishes.
First Nations resource – Yarning Our Wishes: First Nations – End of Life Resources – Proveda
Send-offs can be uplifting and memorable experiences. Consider these questions when planning a send-off:
- Cremation, burial or something else?
- Funeral home package or something personal?
- Event at home, outdoors, or place of worship?
- Party afterward or no fuss?
Advanced Care Planning Events
2026
24 March, 6:30pm: Early Identification, Advance Care Planning & GP-Led Palliative Care. Register here.
This online webinar aims to enhance participants’ understanding of early identification of patients with palliative care needs, and to provide practical guidance on advance care planning and GP-led palliative care approaches.
Other Resources and Links
Knowing where to seek available support from diagnosis through to the end-of-life period and beyond is important to ensure you receive appropriate care.
How well do you know your partner? We put couples to the test. You know their favourite food. You’re pretty sure about their bucket list holiday destination. But are you prepared for life’s toughest decisions? Watch the video.
Aboriginal Community Support Worker, Chris Thorne, talks about the importance of writing down an advance care plan so people will know your wishes if you become seriously ill or injured and cannot speak for yourself. Watch the video.
If you got really sick, and you couldn’t speak for yourself, would your family and doctor (or Aboriginal Health Worker) know what you want or don’t want with your health care? Respectful and approachable resources are available via Advance Care Planning for First Nations People.
Plan ahead and be prepared with this factsheet: Things to consider before you call an ambulance if an emergency situation arises.
When someone you love is living with a serious illness, it can be hard to know what to do – especially when things change quickly at home. Dr Madeleine Juhrmann, a palliative care researcher trained in paramedicine, shares practical insights in her latest article: Paramedics and Palliative Care: What Families Need to Know
Dying To Know (D2K) is a national campaign inspiring Australians to begin preparations for the inevitable, not with fear, but with purpose, love, and a sense of legacy.
Its purpose is to challenge the silence around these topics and empower individuals to take control of their end-of-life decisions. By fostering a culture of awareness and preparedness, D2K aims to make discussions about mortality more approachable and less stigmatised, helping people feel confident in making their own plans for the future.
You can access an Advance Care Directive form and information guide from NSW Health.
Thursdays@3 is a podcast and video series from Palliative Care Australia, featuring discussions with experts from the field and people living and working at the end-of-life. With over 40 years of experience in nursing, Rose Sexton has seen a thing or two. Her passion for palliative and end-of-life care emerged early, with an active interest in Oncology nursing. Alongside these health-related passions, she is, at heart, a musician and actress. Rose also had personal experience caring for her husband through his end-of-life journey in 2019. Listen to the podcast.
In this deeply moving TED Talk, Lucy Kalanithi reflects on life and purpose, sharing the story of her late husband, Paul, a young neurosurgeon who turned to writing after his terminal cancer diagnosis. “Engaging in the full range of experience – living and dying, love and loss – is what we get to do,” Kalanithi says. “Being human doesn’t happen despite suffering; it happens within it.”
We can’t control if we’ll die, but we can “occupy death,” in the words of emergency doctor, Peter Saul. In this TED Talk, Peter asks us to think about the end of our lives and to question the modern model of slow, intubated death in a hospital. Two big questions can help you start this tough conversation.
The Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council of NSW has created a toolkit to guide First Nations people through end-of-life care.
The Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation’s, Understanding the Palliative Care Journey: A guide for individuals, carers, communities and family provides information to aid in understanding what a palliative care journey may hold for First Nations people across Australia.
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