Eileen Donoghue

Eileen is a registered nurse with extensive expertise in complex symptom management and the terminal phase of care. She has worked in palliative and end-of-life care sectors, across metropolitan and regional Western Australia and in the United Kingdom in hospices, specialist palliative care inpatient units, in palliative care education. Senior leadership roles centred around clinical education, promotion of palliative and end-of-life care, and support of the wider workforce to optimise care for people with palliative and end-of-life care needs.

Eileen understands the lived experience can alter perceptions of how we view palliative and end-of-life care and can enlighten those who work within healthcare to the challenges of not only providing end-of-life care to loved ones but grappling with their own professional expectations of what dying well means. She acknowledges that for specialist palliative care clinicians' pressures to 'get it right' can be magnified. 

With a belief that education is the cornerstone of excellent palliative and end-of-life care, Eileen 's passions centre around

• Curriculum development in the asynchronous online learning environment that supports students to engage and learn in ways that meet the unique needs of individual learners.
• Educational strategies that better support our workforce to manage the increasing number of people and the complexity of populations requiring palliative and end-of-life care in Australia.
• The trifecta of difficulties that healthcare professionals continually encounter related to - recognising a dying patient, the seeming disconnects between societal avoidance around discussions of death, and dying, and the over-medicalisation of death.