Eileen Harris

A registered nurse since 2002, Eileen has extensive palliative care clinical experience with expertise in complex symptom management and the terminal phase of care. Eileen has worked across metropolitan and regional Western Australia and in the United Kingdom in hospices and specialist palliative care inpatient units. Key clinical roles have centered around the provision of additional support and education to local community palliative care services to enable individuals and families to experience more positive transitions between home and hospital settings.

With a belief that palliative care education is the cornerstone of excellent end-of-life care, her career has focussed on education that supports an increased understanding of the benefits of palliative care and how the accurate assessment and management of symptoms are vital for the delivery of quality care across the spectrum of healthcare settings.

Eileen's key areas of interest include the seeming disconnect between societal avoidance around discussions of death and dying and the over-medicalisation of death. This is coupled with the opposing question of how can we best implement ground-level effective educational strategies that better support our current clinicians to manage the increasing number of people and the complexity of populations requiring palliative care in Australia. Do you see the conundrum?