In Australia, approximately 60,000 live in residential aged care around the time of their death. But they don’t necessarily die there. Palliative care for these residents is important.

PCOC’s residential aged care (RAC) palliative care outcomes program

PCOC is a national outcomes and benchmarking program implemented across Australia.

PCOC's program in residential aged care helps improve palliative care outcomes in residents, and their carers and family. It provides a routine screening, assessment and response model to be used with each resident.

PCOC has been proven to be a successful model to drive systems-level improvements across different care settings with older adults.

Participation in PCOC is free. Participation in PCOC is voluntary. Please join us by participating in PCOC’s aged care program.

Central to the program is a framework and protocol for routine clinical assessment and response. Routine assessments at the point-of-care are key. This is because they capture important and meaningful information that help improve resident and carer outcomes. Part of the PCOC model involves feedback to individual RAC facilities. Service-to-service benchmarking also helps drive improvements.

Being part of PCOC demonstrates a commitment to maintaining quality and striving for ongoing improvement. The PCOC program can support facilities in meeting Aged Care Quality Standards. PCOC can help achieve and maintain accreditation. Download the Mapping PCOC to ACQS resource (pdf) which supports facilities in achieving accreditation and describes how PCOC supports the quality standards.

The program is supported by funding from the Wicking Trust and the Australian Government Department of Health.


© PCOC UOW 2020. The intellectual property associated with a suite of resources on this website is owned by the Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC), University of Wollongong. PCOC has placed resources in the public domain and is happy for others to use them without charge, modification or development. These resources cannot be modified or developed without the consent of the University.

PCOC is a national palliative care project funded by the Australian Government Department of Health.