Assessment of quality in specialist palliative care service delivery for Indigenous Australians

Multi-jurisdictional data routinely collected by the Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration during the period 01/01/2010–30/06/2015 (N=144,951 patients) were used to investigate equity of specialist palliative care provided to Indigenous (n=1515) compared with non-Indigenous patients. Indigenous Australians were substantially underrepresented in care by participating services, likely reflecting a combination of access barriers and limited involvement of services in rural and remote areas. Indigenous patients also experienced modestly disproportionate delays in initiation of care episodes but these delays appeared not to result in poorer clinical status at entry. Indigenous and non-Indigenous patients fared similarly in relation to other benchmarked quality-of-care measures.