Abstract
Dear Editor
As chair of the Palliative Care Congress 2016 which is being held in Glasgow between 9 and 11 March, I wanted to write to your readership to inform them of the specific parts of the congress that we are relating to research within the palliative care field.
We titled the conference “Rediscovering holism” as we feel as a committee that there is a danger of our specialty becoming polarized between those who view evidence and science being important and those who view the caring and people aspect of palliative care. We would strongly argue that both are required within the specialty. Both elements are needed for us to deliver holistic care, and the two are not mutually exclusive and both aspects are strongly represented in the program.
We are very excited that Prof. Arthur Frank has agreed to attend as our headline speaker. Art is a sociologist from Canada and is an expert on the use of narrative within research. He will be delivering a workshop specifically looking at how to use narrative research methods within a palliative care setting.
Prof. Marie Fallon has also agreed to come and speak as one of our headline speakers. Prof. Fallon has agreed to speak on the up-to-date evidence of the use of ketamine within palliative care. A large part of the Palliative Care Congress program is given over to posters and to oral presentations from research that has happened throughout the country. For the first time, we have agreed to have posters relating to case studies. We have also added a research section with regard to ethics within palliative medicine for which we have accepted abstracts
We have continued to accept research that relates to service provision within units, and we believe that this encourages palliative care units to develop a culture of research. Last congress we added a section called International Palliative Care. We have repeated this. All the abstracts that have been accepted by the congress and that have been accepted for both poster and oral presentation will be printed in the Palliative Medicine journal electronically.
I hope the above gives you some idea of the breadth and scope of the research to be presented at the conference next year. We hope to see you and welcome you to the palliative care congress in March 2016.