National Palliative Care Week 2025 – What’s your plan?

Background

The Australian College of Nursing (ACN) End of Life Care Faculty recognises the importance of raising awareness and promoting open conversations around death and dying. From a health-promoting palliative care perspective, this can involve considerations of how communities can live, die, and grieve well.

National Palliative Care Week

As the largest annual awareness-raising initiative across Australia, National Palliative Care Week is now in its 30th year.

Running from Sunday 11 May to Saturday 17 May 2025, this year’s campaign challenges different groups to take action by asking a simple yet powerful question: What’s your plan?

What’s your plan?

For nurses, nursing practice can achieve better health outcomes when patients and their families are better informed and more comfortable engaging in open conversations about death and dying, particularly in the clinical contexts of decision making and advance care planning.

Reflecting on her practice in residential aged care, Aroha Lucas MACN, Leadership Support, ACN End of Life Care Faculty, writes:

“Planning for the future is important, particularly in aged care. My clinical team and I regularly engage with clients and their stakeholders to ask ‘What’s your plan?’. We capture this plan in a goals of care document.

This is not a ‘set and forget’ document, it is a working document which undergoes review at least annually or as the person’s care needs and goals of care change. Having clear goals of care completed in consultation with the client, stakeholders, and multidisciplinary team ensures the client’s wishes are clearly outlined and their plans for their future healthcare needs will be respected. Dignity and respect at the end of a client’s life is just as important as the journey before it.”

Ashka Jolly MACN, Leadership Support, ACN End of Life Care Faculty, elaborates further, in the context of nursing for those at the other end of the lifespan:

“I am a paediatric palliative care nurse, and I feel lucky to be part of a team that devises a plan together, which is informed by the leading medical teams about advance care planning for the child with the life-limiting condition. Initially, and where time allows — which it most often does — we seek to understand who the child is, what is important to them and their family, and how we can best provide support, now and into the future. Hearing the child’s voice is an important part of our plan.

In advance care planning in children and young people, supporting exploration and treatment that is in line with their wishes is an integral element. We also facilitate advance care planning in the perinatal setting, with children and young people, and with teenagers. Something that might be a surprise to some people is that parallel planning—plans for two different pathways—is a common approach in paediatric palliative care. We double the advance care planning.”

For anyone working with children with a life-limiting condition, you could consider drawing from the five cardinal questions used in paediatric palliative care below (Palliative Care Australia, 2025; Waldman et al., 2013):

• Who is your child (as a person)?
• What is your understanding of your child’s illness? What does the illness mean to you and your family?
• In light of your understanding, what is most important regarding your child’s care?
• What are your hopes for your child? What are your fears and concerns regarding your child?
• Where do you find support and strength?

But the benefits of, and need for, planning extend well beyond clinical nursing settings. For individuals and families, the question of ‘what’s your plan?’ challenges them to contemplate their own future, consider informed choices, and decide how they might want to be cared for. For the broader health and care sectors, it promotes reflection on capacity, innovation, and service-level readiness to accommodate increasing demand in a society where communities can feel empowered by planning for end of life. Finally, for governments, this question represents a call to action and accountability, opening up more meaningful opportunities to discuss policy, investment, and strategy to better address the future palliative and end-of-life care needs across Australia.

What you can do to help

You can help raise awareness of National Palliative Care Week via social media using the hashtag #NPCW2025. Alternatively, you can download resources, including a Supporter Toolkit for use in your social media, website, or emails.