Review of LaTrobe Community Health Service (LCHS) Palliative Care Program

LCHS requested a review of their Palliative Care Program to identify and provide solutions to financial, operational and statutory compliance issues and risks. Critically, this included a focus on workforce capacity to meet demand and a model of care that could meet funding requirements, community expectation and contemporary practice. Larter Consulting was commissioned to carry out the review and engaged HMA to analyse and present findings on LCHS’ operational and financial data, this required:

• Carrying out data cleansing to remove null records and linking discrete datasets
• Determining service demand, including for the on-call service
• Developing a consumer profile including length of stay and palliative care phase
• Costing the ‘as-is’ model of care in a detailed financial statement and comparison to the service budget
• Costing the proposed model of care options to assess their financial viability.

This project commenced in August 2019 and was completed in October 2019.