Sustainability of a nurse-led end of life (PEACH) community model of care

Palliative Extended and Care at Home (PEACH) program, implemented in 2013, aimed to support palliative care clients in their last days of life at their own home. Understanding the factors that influence the sustainability of a program was vital to improving the longevity, adaptability, and quality of service delivery models. This study aimed to assess the sustainability of PEACH model of care through analysis of data at different time points where services were delivered by different service providers. Deidentified data were collected retrospectively for all consecutive patients receiving a PEACH package until separation from the package to explore the clinical and sociodemographic determinants of the sustainable PEACH model of care. Additionally, feedback on the services via survey was obtained from the clients’ primary carers. The majority of the PEACH package recipients who had a clear preference to die at home when the service was initiated were able to achieve their goal to die at home (77%–84%). Eighty-six percent of the carers were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the overall care provided by PEACH. The result shows that PEACH model of care managed to sustain and optimize the patients’ outcome despite transitioning to different service providers for partnerships and collaboration.