News

Looking back over the 2024 – 2025 financial year as we prepare the PCNSW Annual Report we take a moment to reflect on our activity.

2025 saw us reach 10 years of supporting palliative care volunteering in NSW. What an achievement!

Our renewed funding for 2024-2027 brought with it a new name – the Volunteer Services Support Program – and an update to our logo.

Our main volunteer training resource, the Palliare: A Handbook for Palliative Care Volunteers in NSW underwent a major re-write. This new third edition is available as a printed book or a download from our Volunteer Hub website.

The Volunteer Managers Conference was held in Sydney on 19 & 20 September. 18 delegates came from over 10 LHDs to attend the two-day offering.

2025 saw us launch our inaugural palliative care volunteer awards. Kevin Stokes from Great Lakes Palliative Care was announced as the winner at an event held during National Volunteer Week.

As always, we were busy supporting volunteers, volunteer managers, and volunteer services. We attended three in-person regional meetups visiting Tamworth, Coffs Harbour, and Dungog. We delivered 7 educational forums plus training for managers on the National Standards for Volunteer Involvement.

We hosted the NSW Network of Managers of Palliative Care Volunteers running meetings every quarter. Four new services joined our network – 2 in Sydney metro and 2 from regional areas.

The Volunteer Hub website continues to be the repository for palliative care volunteering information with over 23,000 page visits. Our ‘Find a volunteer service‘ page is the most popular and we posted 144 stories to our news page.

And we published research undertaken by Kate Bowman and our Macquarie University intern James MacDonald – Tracking the post-COVID recovery of palliative care volunteer services in NSW.

The Volunteer Services Support Program is funded by the NSW Ministry of Health. We thank them for their ongoing support of this important program.

We also thank all the volunteers, volunteer managers, and palliative care services who support us. Thank you for coming to our events, engaging with our resources, attending our education forums, participating in our networks, reading our newsletters, and being an active part of the sector. We love the connection, the community, and advocating for palliative care volunteering right alongside you.