Strong Voices

Kim Fuller, Clinical Nurse Consultant with the IDEA Services National Clinical Team, has joined a group working to improve palliative care in New Zealand.

Kim has been chosen to be part of Te Whatu Ora’s National Palliative Care Steering Group. Its job is to advise the government agency on how to make sure palliative and end-of-life care meets the needs of all New Zealanders and their whānau.

Kim says there has been a focus, nationally, on upskilling staff in the aged care sector, but other residential service providers have been missing out. She sees a gap in palliative care support for people with intellectual disabilities, with brain injuries and in poor mental health.

She says Te Whatu Ora requested expressions of interest from people keen on joining the steering group.

“I really felt quite strongly when I saw the expression of interest that it wouldn’t really reach the sector, so that is why I put my hand up.”

The initial focus of the steering group will be to:

• recommend how to achieve fair access to, and outcomes from, palliative care services for all New Zealanders

• identify and recommend core palliative care services that will be publicly funded

• develop a national model for paediatric and adult palliative care • propose national adult specialist palliative care service specifications and costings

• recommend how to sustain a clinically and culturally competent and diverse workforce.

Kim, who is from Whangārei, started working for IDEA Services as a Health Adviser for Northland in 2006. She had previously worked as a nurse in London and Scotland, and then in Australia at the [since closed) Camperdown Children’s Hospital in Sydney, providing palliative care for brain-injured children.

The IDEA Services Clinical and Learning and Development teams have recently developed an online palliative care learning module as an introduction for support staff. It is a collaboration with Hospice New Zealand. “It’s a different way of caring,” Kim says. “Palliative care is about the whole person and their support networks.”

She is keen to reframe the way we talk about end-of-life care, to make the words ‘palliative care and ‘hospice’ less confronting.

In the module, support staff will hear more about Veronica Kennedy. In a case study Service Manager Liam Searson describes the efforts made by IDEA Services staff to advocate for Veronica to get the best treatment for her complex medical problems.

Caption: Kim Fuller, Clinical Nurse Consultant with the IDEA Services National Clinical Team, and Service Manager Liam Searson.

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