About this event

  • Date and time Tue 1 Mar 2022 from 9:00am to 5:00pm
  • Location Online
  • Organised by Palliative Care

This live stream is an event presenting the analysis and recommendations of the new Lancet Commission on the value of death. This is a multidisciplinary, multi-year and international collaboration to rebalance the fractured relationships of medicine and society with death and dying. 

To attend this event in London, please click here.

Join Lancet Commissioners, along with a range of external experts, journalists, healthcare providers, patients, and policy-makers to discuss and debate the challenges and opportunities surrounding society and medicine’s responses to death, dying, grief, and care for patients, families, and communities. 

Live stream objectives:

  • Understand the challenges relating to how people live, die, and grieve globally

  • Explore the broader contexts of society’s and medicine’s relationships to death and dying, including climate change, assisted dying, COVID-19, and efforts to achieve immortality

  • Appreciate the role we all play in shaping the meanings of death and dying, how people and healthcare systems can collectively improve what people experience at the end of life and in grief

Join in the conversation online using #ValueOfDeath
Follow us on Twitter: @RoySocMed

Agenda

View the programme

Welcome and introduction

Jocalyn Clark, Executive Editor, The Lancet

Session one

Dr Libby Sallnow, President, Palliative Care Section, Royal Society of Medicine 

Impetus and context of the Commission

Dr Richard Smith, Point of Care Foundation

Immortality, death and dying

Ms Anjana Ahuja, Science Commentator and Journalist 

Overtreatment at the end of life

Professor Rajagopal, Palliative Care Physician, Kerala, India

Panel discussion

Session two

Dr Charlotte Chamberlain

Dementia, death, and care

Professor Bettina Sandgathe Husebø, Head of Centre for Elderly and Nursing Home Medicine and Head of Innovation, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen

Gender and care of the dying

Dr Ros Taylor, Harlington Hospice 

Death and faith

Mrs Mpho Tutu van Furth, Preacher, Teacher and Writer 

Value of death

Dr Robin Durie, Senior Lecturer, Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health

Panel discussion
Break

Session three

Dr Richard Smith

Death and disadvantage: Social and structural determinants of inequities at the end of life

Dr Afsan Bhadelia , Senior Research Associate, Department of Global Health, Boston, United States of America 

Death anxiety

Dr Sheldon Solomon, Professor of Psychology, Skidmore College, United States of America 

The economics of dying

Professor Eric Finkelstein, Executive Director, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore 

Links with the Lancet Palliative Care Commission

Professor Felicia Knaul, The Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine and Director, Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas, University of Miami, United States of America 

Panel discussion
Break

Session four

Climate crisis, healthcare and death and dying

Dr Courtney Howard, Emergency Physician, University of Calgary, Canada 

Rituals

Dr Brandy Schillace, Author and Historian

A systems approach and the realistic utopia

Dr Libby Sallnow 

Recommendations

Dr Seamus O’Mahony, Consultant Gastroenterologist, Cork University Hospital and Author, The Way We Die Now 

Panel discussion
Break

Session five: The debate

Professor Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies, University of Edinburgh, Chair, BBC's Scottish Religious Advisory Committee and Board Member, UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation

Ms Hermione Elliot, Founder and Director, Living Well Dying Well

Professor Katherine Sleeman, Laing Galazka Chair in Palliative Care and Honorary Consultant in Palliative Medicine

Closing remarks

Dr Libby Sallnow

Close of meeting

Location

Online

Disclaimer: All views expressed in this live stream are of the speakers themselves and not of the RSM nor the speaker's organisations.

Registration for this live stream will close 2 hours prior to the start time. You will receive the link 2 hours before the meeting. Late registrations will not be accepted.

This live stream will be available for registered delegates 60 days after on Zoom. The link will be sent 24 hours after the webinar takes place. 

This live stream will be recorded and stored by the Royal Society of Medicine and may be  distributed  in future on various internet channels.

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