Catherine ‘Kate’ Swetenham has a passion for ensuring end of life care is delivered professionally and compassionately to those who need it. Working as a Palliative Care Nurse for 20 years, Catherine’s career has progressed from the bedside to service leadership and more recently to end of life policy.
Catherine is a 2017 Churchill Fellow who undertook her Fellowship to better understand the barriers and enablers to implementing an end of life strategy in countries with a similar health system to Australia.
Learnings from Ireland, Scotland, England and Canada have been drawn upon to develop the body of work now being undertaken by the End-of-Life Team within South Australia’s Department for Health and Wellbeing.
Catherine is the Clinical Lead for the End-of-Life Team and provides clinical support to programs of work in Advance Care Planning, Palliative Care, Voluntary Assisted Dying and Grief and Bereavement.
Innovative work programs have focused on underserved populations who often miss out on accessing and receiving palliative care when it is required. The Fellowship identified this as a common problem in all countries visited and work continues today to address inequity in end-of-life care provision.
Catherine has published under her preferred name Kate Swetenham in the area of palliative care service design and delivery. She holds Academic Status with Flinders University and is a member of the Flinders University Research Centre for Palliative Care Death and Dying. Catherine holds a Bachelor of Nursing, a Graduate Diploma in Psycho-Oncology, a Master of Palliative Care and a Master of Science.
Project
To successfully implement an End of Life care strategy for South Australia
Catherine Swetenham
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