Outcomes in Palliative Care, Report 12 (July - December 2011) - New South Wales

Introduction PCOC aims to assist services to improve the quality of the palliative care they provide through the analysis and benchmarking of patient outcomes. In this, the twelfth PCOC report, data submitted for the July - December 2011 period are summarised and patient outcomes benchmarked to enable participating services to assess their performance and identify areas in which they may improve. This report is broken into three sections: Section 1 summarises each of the four major benchmark measures and subsets and presents national benchmarking results for these benchmarks Section 2 presents additional analysis for each of the sixteen benchmarks Section 3 provides descriptive analysis of the data items at each of the patient, episode and phase levels In each of the three sections, data and analysis for NSW is presented alongside the national figures for comparative purposes. The national figures reflect all palliative care services who submitted data for the July - December 2011 period. A full list of these services can be found at www.pcoc.org.a

Outcomes in Palliative Care, Report 12 (July - December 2011) - Queensland

PCOC aims to assist services to improve the quality of the palliative care they provide through the analysis and benchmarking of patient outcomes. In this, the twelfth PCOC report, data submitted for the July - December 2011 period are summarised and patient outcomes benchmarked to enable participating services to assess their performance and identify areas in which they may improve. This report is broken into three sections: Section 1 summarises each of the four major benchmark measures and subsets and presents national benchmarking results for these benchmarks Section 2 presents additional analysis for each of the sixteen benchmarks Section 3 provides descriptive analysis of the data items at each of the patient, episode and phase levels In each of the three sections, data and analysis for QLD is presented alongside the national figures for comparative purposes. The national figures reflect all palliative care services who submitted data for the July - December 2011 period. A full list of these services can be found at www.pcoc.org.a

Evaluation of the Improving Social Connectedness of Older Australians project pilot: Informing future policy considerations

This report draws on findings and lessons learned through the Australian Government funded evaluation of the Improving Social Connectedness of Older Australians (ISCOA) pilot. It summarises what has worked in the context of the evaluation to help inform the Government’s future models of care and interventions for lonely and socially isolated older Australians

PCOC National Report on Outcomes in Palliative Care in Australia July to December 2011

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) was established in mid-2005 and is funded under the National Palliative Care Program supported by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing. The goal of the PCOC is to use standardised, validated, clinical assessment tools to benchmark and measure outcomes in palliative care; and assist palliative care services to improve the quality of care. Further information on the tools can be found at www.pcoc.org.au. Each service involved in PCOC submits data every six months. The data are then collated and fed back to services to inform service improvement. Participation in PCOC is voluntary. There are three levels of data items - patient, episode and phase. The broad detail is found at the patient level, where the data items look at patient demographics. At the episode level, the items focus on characterising each setting of palliative care. They also describe the reasons behind why and how palliative care episodes start/end, the level of support patients receive both before and after an episode and (where applicable) the setting in which the patient died. The clinical focus of the data is at the phase level. The items at this level describe the patient\u27s stage of illness, functional impairment as well as their levels of pain and symptom distress. The items at the phase level are used to quantify patient outcomes, and are the focus of the PCOC benchmarks. The current PCOC data set (Version 2) was introduced in July 2007 following consultation with palliative care services and approval by PCOC\u27s Scientific and Clinical Advisory Committee. The data set includes five clinical assessment tools: Phases of Care, Palliative Care Problem Severity Score (PCPSS), Symptom Assessment Scale (SAS), Australia-modified Karnofsky Performance Status Scale (AKPS) and Resource Utilisation Groups - Activities of Daily Living (RUG-ADL). The items included in the PCOC data set serve the dual purpose of: - defining a common clinical language to allow communication between palliative care providers - facilitating the routine collection of national palliative care data for the purpose of reporting and benchmarking to drive quality improvement. Revised phase definitions were implemented in January 2012 but the data in this report does not reflect the revised definitions

Patient Outcomes in Palliative Care, Report 13 (January - June 2012) - Western Australia

PCOC aims to assist services to improve the quality of the palliative care they provide through the analysis and benchmarking of patient outcomes. In this, the thirteenth PCOC report, data submitted for the January - June 2012 period are summarised and patient outcomes benchmarked to enable participating services to assess their performance and identify areas in which they may improve. This report is broken into four sections: Section 1 provides a summary of the data included in this report. Section 2 summarises each of the four outcome measures and presents national benchmarking results for a selection of these measures. Section 3 presents a more detailed analysis of the outcome measures and benchmarks. Section 4 provides descriptive analysis at each of the patient, episode and phase data levels. In each of the four sections, data and analysis for services in WA is presented alongside the national figures for comparative purposes. The national figures reflect all palliative care services who submitted data for the January - June 2012 period. A full list of these services can be found at www.pcoc.org.au The four outcome measures included in this report were first introduced in the reporting period January to June 2009 (Report 7). There is strong sectoral support for national benchmarks and a consensus that such benchmarks can drive service innovation regardless of model of care. Benchmarking provides opportunities to understand the services that are provided, the outcomes patients experience and also to generate research opportunities focused on how to demonstrate variations in practice and outcomes

The evolutionary demise of a social interaction: experimentally induced loss of traits involved in the supply and demand of care

Phenotypic plasticity enables animals to adjust their behavior flexibly to their social environment—sometimes through the expression of adaptive traits that have not been exhibited for several generations. We investigated how long social adaptations can usefully persist when they are not routinely expressed, by using experimental evolution to document the loss of social traits associated with the supply and demand of parental care. We allowed populations of burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides to evolve in two different social environments for 48 generations in the lab. In “Full Care” populations, traits associated with the supply and demand of parental care were expressed at every generation, whereas in “No Care” populations we prevented expression of these traits experimentally. We then revived trait expression in the No Care populations at generations 24, 43, and 48 by allowing parents to supply post-hatching care and compared these social traits with those expressed by the Full Care populations. We found that offspring demands for care and male provision of care in the No Care populations were lost sooner than female provision of care. We suggest that this reflects differences in the strength of selection for the expression of alternative traits in offspring, males and females, which can enhance fitness when post-hatching care is disrupted

Victoria: patient outcomes in palliative care: July - December 2014

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) assists services to improve the quality of the palliative care they provide through the analysis and benchmarking of patient outcomes. In this PCOC report, data submitted for the July to December 2014 period are summarised and patient outcomes benchmarked to enable participating services to assess their performance and identify areas in which they may improve

Queensland, patient outcomes in palliative care, January - June 2015

The Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) is a national program that utilises standardised clinical assessment tools to measure and benchmark patient outcomes in palliative care. Participation in PCOC is voluntary and can assist palliative care service providers to improve practice. This is achieved via the PCOC patient outcome improvement framework which is designed to: * provide clinicians with the tools to systematically assess individual patient experiences using validated clinical assessment tools, * define a common clinical language to streamline communication between palliative care providers, * facilitate the routine collection of national palliative care data to drive quality improvement through reporting and benchmarking, * provide service-to-service benchmarking reports and opportunities to discuss sector results at benchmarking workshops, and * support research using the PCOC longitudinal database (2006-2015)

Optical Fibre Sensors Using Graphene-Based Materials: A Review

Graphene and its derivatives have become the most explored materials since Novoselov and Geim (Nobel Prize winners for Physics in 2010) achieved its isolation in 2004. The exceptional properties of graphene have attracted the attention of the scientific community from different research fields, generating high impact not only in scientific journals, but also in general-interest newspapers. Optical fibre sensing is one of the many fields that can benefit from the use of these new materials, combining the amazing morphological, chemical, optical and electrical features of graphene with the advantages that optical fibre offers over other sensing strategies. In this document, a review of the current state of the art for optical fibre sensors based on graphene materials is presented