SPPC Annual Conference 2024 - “The Space Between"

Wednesday 06 November 2024 

John McIntyre Conference Centre, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5AY.

Catch up with colleagues from across Scotland and make new connections at the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care Annual Conference. 

Hear new and challenging perspectives, take part in interactive sessions and be energised and inspired.

Programme

Scroll down for a list of confirmed speakers and check out the conference programme here: SPPC Annual Conference 2024  

Book your place

Buy your ticket here: SPPC Annual Conference bookings on Eventbrite 

Call for posters and exhibitors

If you are interested in exhibiting a poster or stand at the conference, please get in touch.  More information is available here: Call for posters, exhibition stands and public displays

Confirmed Speakers

Mhoira Leng

Dr Mhoira Leng graduated from Aberdeen University and was one of the first Scottish specialists trained in palliative care then consultant in Grampian NHS Trust for 10 years. Pursuing her interest in global health she founded Cairdeas International Palliative Care Trust and has now worked across 4 continents and more than 20 countries to advocate and build capacity for palliative care. Invited to establish the first centre of excellence for palliative care within Makerere University, since 2008 she is also Senior Fellow with the Global Health Academy, University of Edinburgh.  Mhoira co-founded ‘Palliative care in a changing climate’ and PallCHASE which advocates for and supports palliative care integration in humanitarian situations and emergencies.  Mhoira is passionate about transformative, compassionate health care with a focus on those living with serious illness and in fragile settings. She continues to explore these words, spoken by her student at the Islamic University of Gaza - “palliative care is humanity until infinity”.

Check out Mhoira’s presentation here

Sarah Yardley

Sarah Yardley is an Associate Professor of Palliative Medicine in the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, University College London. Clinically she works in the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust / Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust palliative care service. 

Her research focuses on reducing the gaps between rhetoric and reality, policy and practice, expectations and experience in healthcare. She is particularly interested in the hidden work of people - patients, families, carers, and healthcare professionals – and the need to redeem the role of relationship-centred practices in healthcare systems. 

Current awards include a Marie Curie funded study ‘Getting prescription medications right at home, in hospital & Hospice,’ a THIS Institute Fellowship focused on relationship-centred approaches in healthcare systems which has lead to innovative creative public engagement, the ‘Rewilding Healthcare’ project and a Churchill Fellowship focused on developing good palliative care systems for people living with severe and enduring mental illness.

Check out Sarah’s plenary session here

Check out Sarah’s breakout session here

Simon Noah Etkind

Simon Noah Etkind is Assistant Professor of Palliative Care at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on improving care for those with serious and life limiting illnesses; he is particularly interested in the uncertainties inherent to complex illness trajectories such as multimorbidity, and how we can optimise care to address uncertainty and improve patient and carer experience.

Simon studied medicine at Emmanuel College Cambridge before undertaking postgraduate training in London and Sussex. He has combined clinical and academic work as an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow (2012 – 2015) and Clinical PhD Fellow (2016 – 2019) at King’s College London, and as a Clinical Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (2020 – 2023).

He continues to work clinically as a consultant in palliative medicine at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation trust alongside his academic role in the Palliative and End of Life Care in Cambridge (PELiCam) research group.

Check out Simon’s presentation here 

 

Usha Grieve

Usha Grieve specialises in the legal rights that can enable people to plan ahead for their treatment and care, and the support needed to ensure each individual has the death that is right for them.

She is Director of Partnerships & Services at Compassion in Dying, a charity that supports people to make decisions about and plan for the end of life.

She has written on advance decision-making and has a particular interest in the barriers and motivators to considering and recording treatment wishes for the end of life.

She presents on a range of issues in the field of communication in end of life care, capacity, medical decision-making and how different communities experience end-of-life planning.

Check out Usha’s presentation here

Kate Clark

Kate Clark is a palliative and community nurse with 20 years experience and co-founder/trustee of Scotland-wide Pushing Up the Daisies charity. 

She is co-author of Slow Down When Someone Dies - a call to everyone, and particularly carers, to take time after someone’s last breath to tend to their longer term wellbeing.

Kate’s first memory of death is being lifted up at the age of five to see her granny in her coffin. In her mid-thirties, her experiences of her beloved uncle dying at home led her to change course from engineering to nursing so that she could support people in their choice to die at home.

Following her profound and helpful experiences in the days after her aunt’s last breath, Kate was moved to found the award winning charity Pushing Up the Daisies in 2016 to raise awareness of the rich potential of the days between someone’s last breath and their funeral. She currently runs the charity’s educational initiatives to inform people of their rights and options during this time.

Check out Kate and Dietmar’s presentation here

John Swinton

John Swinton is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care and Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. For more than a decade John worked as a registered mental health nurse. He also worked for a number of years as a hospital and community mental health Chaplain alongside of people with severe mental health challenges who were moving from the hospital into the community. In 2004, he founded the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability. He has published widely within the area of mental health, dementia, disability theology, spirituality and healthcare, end of life care, qualitative research and pastoral care. John is the author of a number of monographs including Finding Jesus in the Storm: The spiritual lives of people with mental health challenges. (Eerdmans 2020) which won the Aldersgate prize for outstanding interdisciplinary work within theology. His book Dementia: Living in the memories of God won the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Ramsey Prize for excellence in theological writing. John is married with 5 children. He is also a musician, and his first album – Beautiful Songs About Difficult Things - is set to come out very soon.

Check out John’s presentation here

Dietmar Hartmann

Dr Dietmar Hartmann retired in 2022 from his post as Consultant in Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine in NHS Tayside.  Dietmar is originally from Germany where he completed his medical training before moving to the UK. Having an interest in complementary medicine he is also trained in Acupuncture. 

Following his retirement he undertook training with Pushing Up the Daisies and became a Trustee of this charity a few months later.  Throughout his career he always had an interest in death and dying and now having more time he enjoys having the opportunity to raise awareness and reduce the stigma around this topic. 

 

 

 

Juliet Spiller

Dr Juliet Spiller has been a consultant in Palliative medicine based at the Marie Curie Hospice in Edinburgh since 2002 supporting inpatient, community and outpatient services. From 2002 to 2010 Juliet also supported the Hospital specialist palliative care services in an acute hospital and the community. It was as a trainee in palliative medicine that she began a research interest in delirium and has since supported numerous studies and QI projects looking at assessment, management, patient and staff experience and education. Other longstanding clinical and research interests in palliative care include future care planning, CPR decision-making, psychological interventions, and medical acupuncture.

Check out Juliet, Anne and Hilary’s presentation here

 

 

 

Anne Finucane

Dr Anne Finucane is a Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Research Lead for Marie Curie Hospice Edinburgh.    Anne’s research is focused on mental health and wellbeing for people impacted by serious life-limiting illness.  Her work involves the development of interventions to help people cope with advanced progressive illness and bereavement. Additional interests include delirium assessment and management, digital interventions, and research to inform policy relevant to palliative care.  Anne co-leads the Mental health in Advanced Illness Network (MAIN) and is an Associate Editor for BMC Palliative Care.

Anne is Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

 

 

 

Hilary Nailon

Since qualifying in 1993, I have worked primarily in either palliative care or clinical research. It was while completing a MSc in palliative care in 2003 that my interest in research truly began. The opportunity to combine my interests first arose in 2019 when I took up the post of Senior Palliative Care Research Nurse within the Edinburgh Cancer Centre. This ultimately led to me joining the Marie Curie team in 2022 as Research Nurse for Scotland.

In my current post, I work closely with the Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow, clinical colleagues across Scotland, and fellow Marie Curie Research Nurses across the UK, as we work together to continue to develop a research active culture within Marie Curie.

I am passionate about the impact of research in improving the experiences of patients, their relatives, and the staff providing the care. I believe in creating positive experiences and memories within the difficult situations people find themselves in.

Dr Libby Ferguson

Libby is Medical Director for Marie Curie Scotland and Consultant in Palliative in NHSGG&C. She trained in Palliative Medicine in the West of Scotland before completing a fellowship in Geelong, Australia where she remained for her first Consultant post. She returned to Glasgow in 2010 to the Marie Curie Hospice where she currently works with sessional input with the Hospital Palliative Care Team, Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She is medical lead for the Specialist Lymphoedema Clinic NHSGG&C. Her professional interests include palliative care in lung cancer, lymphoedema, antimicrobial stewardship and health inequalities at the end of life. She was a steering group member for the University of Glasgow and Marie Curie Dying in the Margins Study involved in recruitment of participants. She is passionate about sharing the study findings on behalf of those who generously shared their stories in the hope that it would help others.

Check out Libby’s presentation here

 

Ashley Mollison

Ashley  (she/her) is a PhD candidate focused on caregiving at the end-of-life in contexts of homelessness and poverty. For the last decade, Ashley has coordinated research projects at the University of Victoria, Canada (P.I. Dr. Kelli Stajduhar) to make visible the experiences of people facing serious health issues alongside health and social inequities, develop and evaluate equity-oriented palliative care programs and services, and produce educational resources to improve access to care at the end of life. Ashley has held various roles in relation to homeless communities such as volunteer, researcher, front line worker, community organizer, and caregiver.

Check out Ashley’s presentation here

 

Dr Sam Quinn

Sam joined the End-of-Life Studies group in July 2021. He works as Research Associate on the Dying in the Margins project. This participatory visual-methods project aims to investigate the experiences of people living with a life-limiting condition while experiencing financial hardship. There are two main phases to the study:  Photovoice with people with a life-limiting diagnosis who are experiencing financial hardship and

Digital stories with bereaved carers and relatives of people who had a life-limiting diagnosis and were experiencing financial challenges.

Before joining the University of Glasgow, Sam completed his Doctoral research on the end-of-life experiences of people with Down syndrome and Dementia in December 2019. This ethnographic work explored the experiences of people living and working in a group home for people with learning disabilities and dementia. Sam has worked on a range of qualitative research projects encompassing quality improvement in the third sector, frontline health staff experiences of working during COVID-19, and a project to facilitate discussions about risk with forensic inpatients with a learning disability.

Check out Sam’s presentation here