MARGARET O’CONNOR BRINGS HER PALLIATIVE-CARE SKILLS TO CATHOLIC HEALTHCARE

Margaret O’Connor is a deeply respected palliative-care clinician and teacher, but you’ll often find her out in a clinical service, far from universities and hospitals.

“I’ve learned over the years I’m not an institutional person,” Emeritus Professor O’Connor says. “I’ve spent nearly all my career as a clinician working in people’s homes.
“I love telling student nurses that the benefits of working in people’s homes include that you don’t have to wear a uniform and there is no shift work!

“But that lack of uniform also symbolises that I am not going into someone’s home with all the answers, but as their equal, and together we try to work through what the best thing is for them to do.”

Professor O’Connor, the most recent appointee to the Catholic Healthcare board, was the inaugural Vivian Bullwinkel Chair in Palliative Care Nursing, at Monash University Melbourne, a position she held from 2003-2014.

Catholic Healthcare has welcomed her wide expertise in the field of palliative care, which it says will be hugely valuable to how it provides end-of-life care and support to older community members.

Professor O’Connor has had a long and diverse career in palliative care, in a wide range of roles that have encompassed the establishment and management of mainly community-based palliative care services.

Professor O’Connor says she still works at Monash, teaching and supervising, but two days a week you’ll find her working with Melbourne City Mission Palliative Care, which runs a large community-based service in the city’s northern suburbs. In her role, she highlights clinical, practice and policy issues by initiating research projects in partnership with the clinicians, all aimed at improving the service.

As a registered nurse, Professor O’Connor came to specialise in palliative care when she was caught up in the system herself.

“I had a personal experience many years ago caring for my Dad at home” she says. “That experience was very formative in that I felt very alone and unsupported – it was before there was a lot of community support for people who were ill at home.

“A couple years later I saw a position in Melbourne’s first palliative care service, that required looking after people at home who were facing the end of their life, applied for and got it.”

Next week is National Palliative Care Week, an annual awareness-raising initiative held to increase understanding of the many benefits of palliative care.

This year’s theme is “It’s your right”, and suggests a need to raise awareness about the rights of all Australians to access high-quality palliative care when and where they need it.

There is strong evidence that Australians do not fully understand the full breadth of palliative care and its benefits, which then presents as a barrier to accessing timely care.

“I think there is always more need to raise awareness,” Professor O’Connor says of what palliative care can do.

“With palliative care the expertise is about helping people when they are facing the final stage of their lives.

“It was a great disservice by both the Prime Minister and Health Minister recently, when they both described increased deaths in aged care as ‘well, they were palliative’, the inference being that people were dying anyway and that palliative care is only for those imminently dying.

“It’s a belief that’s rife in the community, so when someone is referred to a palliative care service they think they have not much time left.

“But in fact palliative care is there to support people in the final stages of their lives, which could be months.

“It is a constant challenge, to educate the community that palliative care expertise means more than making sure an individual has a good death. It’s about ensuring the best quality of life and helping the person to achieve what they want in the final stage of their life.”

“The other thing I like telling student nurses is that palliative care is not something only available in acute hospitals.

“Because I am working in someone’s home, the client is in the driver’s seat, I am only a visitor in their home.

“It turns the care relationship on its head – in hospitals the professionals are in charge – and that’s influenced how I regard people’s choices.”