Gap Analysis of Specialist Palliative Care in New Zealand: Providing a national overview of hospice and hospital-based services

The purpose of the report was to determine how close hospice and hospital providers of specialist palliative care services were to meeting the new draft service specification for specialist palliative care. The gap analysis (or national stock take) confirmed the anecdotal evidence that there are wide variations in the provision of hospice and other specialist palliative care at both local and regional levels. Hospital services particularly are generally limited to nursing and medical services only. There are opportunities for sharing resources between services, such as between the hospice and the hospital-based palliative care service in the same region, to increase the level of access to specialist palliative care, particularly in terms of support for grief, loss and bereavement, for patients, families and whānau.