Palliative Care - Message Survey

Many Not for Profits are keen to find out how they are generally perceived by the wider community to ensure their mission is getting to the right audience. Palliative Care Victoria is one organisation embarking on a campaign to assess community attitudes to the often-avoided issues of death and dying.

Early research by the organisation has found that there are diverse opinions about just what palliative care means and what services are included.

Project Manager Alex Schall is carrying out a comprehensive investigation into community perceptions and how best PCV can address these issues.

Schall says that interestingly the current view (general public and significant number if health care professionals) of palliative care is that it amounts to ‘giving up’ and that it is ‘the end of the road’. This means that referrals to palliative care occur far too late and thus it often is ‘the end of the road’. This perception needs to change radically so as to best utilise the service.

She says the task is to make sure all these stakeholders have common ground to communicate on and that they are all working to improve the well being of those with life threatening illnesses.

Schall will begin speaking to focus groups in the New Year and has developed a short message survey to establish the kinds of language being used to describe palliative care and what people think generally of the concepts.

She is hoping that others in the Not for Profit sector might also like to take part in the survey to give another perspective to her investigation.

If you would like to complete the message survey (which will only take 2-3minutes and is anonymous) just send us an email with the words Palliative Care Survey in the subject line to probono@probonoaustralia.com.au. The Word based survey will provide an email link back to Alex Schall.