I am from a community based palliative care service in Australia. We have been working on competency assessment for quite some time. I have researched alot of the competencies out there and we found that needed to make specific ones which we can we can actually assess to demonstrate that our team have the skills to be a specialist palliative care nurse/support service team member.

Palliative Care Nurses Australia (http://www.pcna.org.au) have been working on competencies for a while as well which have 5 domains:

• Therapeutic Relationships
• Complex Supportive Care
• Collaborative Practice
• Leadership
• Improving Practice

I have found that for our service we need clinical specific competencies. So currently I have created organisation specific competencies (for the whole interdisciplinary team):

1- Palliative Care General (basic theory of pallc)

2- Our organisations Vision and mission

3- CALD competency

4- Information Technology

5- Communciation

6 – Holistic Care

7 – Self Care

8 – OHS

Our Nursing specific competencies include:

1- Assessment

2- Symptom Managment

3- Palliative Care Medications and Managment

4- Technical Skills (inc syringe drivers, catheters, PICCs, NGs and After death care)

5- Care Planning

 I would be interested to know what other services use and how you measure their impact.