In May 2024, Palliative Care Australia launched the National Palliative Care Week Lecture - a tradition we’re wanting to grow each year in and around National Palliative Care Week where we invite a distinguished member of the palliative care community to challenge our thinking and our work.

We’re off to a strong start in 2024.

The demographics of living, dying and caring are evolving rapidly. With that comes a clear and pressing challenge to the care economy. Professor David Currow believes government, health services and the community all have a role to play in meeting our future care needs - but are they ready?

In the inaugural National Palliative Care Week Lecture, at Parliament House, Canberra, Prof Currow explains:

"Our health services today are playing catch-up."

"Our health services are actually geared to the middle of the 20th Century. Not the beginning of the 21st Century.

"We need to confront a very different vitality and therefore a very different mortality. Our social services, our health services, have really not come to grips with that."

Prof Currow is a physician by training, he’s a widely published academic and researcher.

He’s previously been the New South Wales Chief Cancer Officer, Chief Executive Officer of the Cancer Institute of New South Wales and was the Foundation Chief Executive Officer of Cancer Australia. He is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Sustainable Futures at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales.

Missed the lecture but keen to catch up?

Read and download the transcript and slides:

2024 National Palliative Care Week Lecture, transcript with slides pdf

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