WORKSHOPS

Communication Skills Workshop

Instructors: Michelle Gold, Kim Caldwell, Florry O’Connell, Adam Steinberg, Grace Walpole, Amy Waters
Date: Wednesday 22nd November 2023
Time: 1:00pm - 5:00pm
Catering: Light lunch will be available 
Who's eligible: Open to any trainees in Palliative Medicine 
Venue: Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Registrations closing Wednesday the 15th of November

Good communication is an essential skill in palliative medicine but many of us have never had any formal communication skills training. Research shows that communication skills can be learned, and better communication can benefit both patients and healthcare providers. In this interactive half-day workshop, participants will have the opportunity to practice their communication skills in a safe environment with trained facilitators. This workshop is taught using the VitalTalk method and is modelled on the highly–regarded AChPM Communication Skills Workshops.

The Social Life of Death: Critical Social Science Concepts for Palliative Care Professionals 

Instructors: Alex Broom, Katie Kenny, Leah Williams Veazey (Department of Sociology, University of Sydney)
Date: Thursday the 23rd of November
Time: 9:00am - 12:00pm
Catering: Morning tea will be available 
Who's eligible: Open to everyone
Venue: Ballroom at the Novotel on Collins, Melbourne 

'The Social Life of Death' is a half-day face-to-face professional development workshop, focused on the social science of death, dying and bereavement, aimed specifically at palliative, end of life and bereavement care practitioners. 

Social science offers a broad range of concepts that can help palliative care professionals better contextualise and improve death and dying experiences for patients, families and professionals alike. Death is, at once, an intensely personal experience and an experience that is profoundly shaped by broader social systems. In this workshop we tease out these interconnections by taking key death and dying issues head on. We will consider:

> The multivalence of a ‘terminal’ prognosis
> Gender and care at the end of life
> Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD), socio-legal entanglements, and the search for (relational) autonomy
> Death poverty, emerging inequalities, and the role of structural violence in shaping death
> Intergenerational precariousness, financial toxicity, and its relational repercussions for death and dying
> Compromised futures, and death and dying in times of social, economic and environmental fractures

Outcomes of the workshop will include a better understanding of the social shaping of dying and bereavement in our current social context, as well as the intersection of individual and collective meaning-making in the face of mortality.