Demand for palliative and end-of-life care services is set to surge as Australia's population grows older.
Those kinds of treatments are offered to people who live with life-limiting illnesses - such as cancer, motor neurone disease or dementia - that have little to no prospect of a cure.
Though younger patients can receive these treatments, people in their twilight years make up a significant number of those in palliative care.
And as life expectancy grows, so does the population of older Australians and the demand for palliative treatment.
A report released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on Thursday revealed this trend has already begun with 95,000 palliative care hospitalisations between 2021 and 2022, a 29 per cent increase from 2015-16.
About two in every five of those hospitalised were diagnosed with cancer, and roughly two-thirds of primary palliative care hospitalisations ended with the patient dying in hospital.
On average, patients were 75 on admission.
With the number of older Australians set to explode in coming decades, the palliative care industry needs to ramp up its workforce recruitment efforts.
The government's Intergenerational Report revealed the population of Australians aged 65 and over will more than double in the next four decades, the number of over-80s will triple and the number of centenarians will increase six-fold.
While the report showed a 70 per cent increase in palliative medicine physicians between 2013 and 2021, the number of specialised nurses has not experienced the same growth, increasing by 16 per cent from 2013 to 2020, then decreasing by 7 per cent in 2021.
