Many services around Australia are successfully reproducing caring@home resources in their local areas. The project team thought it would be useful to share others’ experience and ideas on how resources are being reproduced. Everyone’s solutions will be different, and that is ok.
How you reproduce resources will depend on characteristics of your individual service, for example the number of patients cared for annually and whether there is a state-wide solution in place for producing resources.
What are the resources that need to be reproduced?
1. Resources for families and carers
Resources needed to teach carers include printed resources, training videos and a practice demonstration kit.
Printed resources for carers and families that can be downloaded from the website include:
Standard caring@home resources
- Carer’s handbook
- Medicines diary
- Writing a label step-by-step guide, Giving a medicine step-by-step guide
- Colour-coded fridge chart
- Short training videos - The five short training videos can be loaded onto a USB stick and left with the carer.
Resources for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families
- Relevant Tip Sheets
- Step-by-Step Guides
- Information flyer - Common symptoms experienced at end of life
- Medicines Book and Wall Chart
- Short Training Videos
- Translated resources for carers are available in nine common languages
Self-print box stickers Clinical services can self-print A4 size labels to attach to the front of self-produced resource boxes. Services can:
Printing Tips
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Tip
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Practice demonstration kit
- An instruction sheet on how to assemble the practice demonstration kit can be downloaded from the website.
- The components of the kit are most probably already available in your service. The service will be able to bulk purchase these items for a lower cost.
2. Resources for nurses
Printed documents can be downloaded from the website and printed internally or professionally:
- Information brochure for carers
- One-on-one training checklist
- Syringe labels – the labels are one of the most expensive parts of the package to produce, but one of the most useful for nurses/carers. N.B. A complete set of syringe labels is 17 pages.)
Syringe Labels Printing Tips
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3. Resources for clinical services
Resources can be downloaded from the website and include:
- Guidelines for the handling of palliative care medicines in community services, developed by NPS MedicineWise, can be used by community service providers to inform the development of detailed protocols and procedures tailored to the requirements of individual services.
- The Example policy and procedures: Supporting carers to help manage breakthrough symptoms safely using subcutaneous medicines in the home may be used by community service providers to develop and/or review relevant documentation within their own policies and procedures framework.
Using volunteers
- One large health district is utilising its volunteers to assemble resources for carers, e.g. stapling documents and compiling them into boxes/bags.
A large specialist palliative care service example
Metro South Palliative Care Service is a large specialist palliative service with a catchment area of more than one million people. Its staff care for more than 2,000 patients per year.
The service is presenting the resources to carers in the following way:
A cloth bag is used to transport the resources to the home, containing:
- A plastic sleeve with the printed carer resources and the USB with training videos
- A second plastic sleeve with resources for nurses – training and competency checklist, syringe labels
- The practice demonstration kit and the sharps container
Tip: The communications department of the HHS assisted with reproducing copies of each printed resource in colour on regular paper – handbook (stapled), diary (stapled), step-by-step guides, fridge chart, information brochure. The resources are assembled and stored in a central location and clinical sites within the service access resources as they need them. |