Palliative Care

The Department of Palliative Care offers a comprehensive specialist service, providing integrated multidisciplinary palliative care across inpatient and community health care settings in the local Newcastle area, as well as support to the district’s wider network of palliative care teams. The vision of palliative care is to provide clinical care, education and research to better enable patients with life limiting illnesses to receive optimal care in their preferred setting.

Our department operates a 17-bed inpatient hospice, a 24-hour multidisciplinary community palliative care service, provides clinical support to the wider Hunter New England Local Health District, outreach rounding to 40 local residential aged care facilities, outpatient ambulatory specialist palliative care clinic, Motor Neurone Disease supportive care clinic, district-wide telehealth clinic, an integrated accelerated transfer to die at home program and bereavement services.

The Palliative Care Research Unit supports research within the department and fosters collaboration with partners to conduct research that matters to patients, with rapid translation into improved service and patient and carer reported outcomes.

Priority research areas include:

  • Optimisation of referral and triage processes to enable timely patient centred care
  • Participatory action research models in service redesign and optimisation
  • Models of multidisciplinary community based palliative care to enable care in the place of preference:
    • Home-based enhanced models of palliative care
    • Palliative care in residential aged care facilities

The Calvary Palliative and End of Life Care Research Institute connects researchers from specialist palliative care services in Calvary’s public hospital network.

Our Researchers Palliative Care Clinical Trials Unit


Dr Rachel Hughes
Clinical Director Palliative Care

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