The palliative care volunteer in 2020

Australia’s changing social demographic and subsequent flow-on effects to volunteer recruitment presents a challenge to palliative care volunteering. Whilst the ACT’s volunteer enrolement leads the country, it can also expect to be subject to the impact of an aging population who themselves may require increasingly higher levels of support near the end of life. How might a response be fashioned to these broad social changes that will preserve the place of the volunteer in palliative care and enable the role to transform to a changing social world? The data collected aim at answering the following questions: - Identify how current volunteers envision the profile and context of their role in eight years time, - Identify those elements of their current role that should be maintained, and - Consider innovations to the role that respond to social changes. Data based on 4 focus groups with a total of 28 participants (semi structured questions.). 4 transcripts with 28 data sources, recorded on a digital recorder and then converted into text. Ethics reviewed by the Calvary Health Care (Australian Capital Territory) and ACU Ethics committees.