One of the things Ms Raatz said she noticed most was the growing awareness about palliative care, which has led to greater access to their services.

"The team has expanded over the years and the number of referrals just continue to grow," she said.

"We've got two full time positions, a clinical nurse educator, a social worker and a medical consultant from Sydney."

Ms Raatz said one of the contributing factors to the growth and greater access has been from "word of mouth".

"Word of mouth has grown immensely over the years because of the reliability of the service and because we've become known in the community," she said.

Ms Raatz and her team at Bega Palliative Care recently celebrated National Palliative Care Week, which was aimed at raising awareness about the services and encouraged Australians to talk about the important issues surrounding death and dying.

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Ms Raatz said this year's theme, Palliative Care: It's your right, was important in raising awareness about the essential service they provide and palliative care being a "universal human right".

"What we're saying is it's everyone's right to be able to access that care, no matter whether you live in a city or a regional, rural area," she said.

Ms Raatz said she and her team were hoping to break down the idea that palliative care was "associated only with end of life care".

Ms Raatz said their role as palliative care practitioners proved to actually show greater success when people came in early to seek support for a life limiting illness.

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"We've seen great clinical evidence and research that shows early engagement with palliative led to people living longer," she said.

Ms Raatz said the patients that are referred to palliative care weren't "just cancer patients" but could include kidney disease, heart disease, lung disease and so on.

Therefore palliative care may have relationships with certain clients for several years, wherein their main objective was to assist people to "live well for as long as possible with their illness".

"Our goal is to work with that person and their family around their physical, emotional, spiritual and social needs and to not only support the patient but their family as well," she said.

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The palliative care department is located on the second floor of Bega's South East Regional Hospital, however Ms Raatz said most of the palliative care services were conducted in people's homes.

"We go and see people in their homes, because often they're not well enough to come to us," she said.

Looking to the future Ms Raatz said she hoped palliative care would be regarded as a positive experience that supported the patient to "really live well for as long as possible".

"We want to support them in understanding what their goals and objectives are, as they move towards the natural end of their life and to ensure it is as comfortable as possible," she said.

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Ms Raatz urged anyone with a declared life limiting illness to reach out for care and support straight away.

"If we meet early we can develop those really good therapeutic relationships and walk the path together and address things early on," she said

"We make a real difference to people's lives despite the life limiting nature of the illness that they're going to live with."

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