About Rapid

Professor Meera Agar:  …for the National Palliative Care Strategy, it really gives direction for both Commonwealth, State and Territory governments about how to deliver high-quality palliative care to all Australians and it really provides the direction and the accountability to achieve that.

The Rapid Program is an international program, which works with clinicians across the world to develop a program in quality improvement to assess interventions that are commonly used in palliative care and it's based on methodology called Postmarketing Surveillance or Phase 4 methodology. It allows us to understand the harms and the benefits of interventions in real world to really inform clinical care.

Clinicians working in palliative care should get involved in the Rapid Program for two reasons; one is at the beginning of a series; one gets to meet with interdisciplinary clinicians and debate what benefits and harms should be included in the data collection and why that might be. The second is that you then get to understand the real-world data from that series and think about how that might affect your clinical practice and where improvements can be made.

The National Palliative Care Strategy asks us to make sure that quality improvement is built into the way we build services and so research and data are really critical to underpin the National Palliative Care Strategy. So Rapid is really contributing directly to provide meaningful data from real world practice that's going to inform that goal.