Conference Agenda

Target Audience

Our research into equity-oriented, arts-based approaches to advance care planning particularly for people from marginalized communities has led to the development of a facilitator training programme and to date over 200 people have been trained to use the approach in their communities. One of the unexpected findings from the facilitator training has been the resistance amongst the palliative care workforce to thinking about their own wishes for end-of-life care. Death anxiety has been shown to be more prevalent amongst the people working with dying people. There are multi-faceted reasons for this – self-protection, dying becoming ‘business as usual’, and ‘them and us’ thinking. The target audience for this workshop is the wider conference community, many of whom have worked for a long time in this field. Less verbal methods, such as art-making, are a useful way to connect with feelings and break down personal resistance. Engagement in conversations about death and dying and personal mortality have been shown to alleviate death anxiety and compassion fatigue in the workforce.

Learning Objectives

• Space and permission to experience engagement in self-inquiry regarding death, dying and mortality
• First-hand experience of using less verbal, arts-based methods as a tool for reflection, learning and facilitation
• Engaging together creatively as a collective conference community in conversations and visual inquiry to promote death literacy
• Collective art-making – the creation of a collective art installation to be displayed during the conference

Structure of the Workshop

Introduction to background of method 15 minutes approximately

Themed art-making in response to structured questions 45 minutes

Group reflection following less verbal self-inquiry 30 minutes

Output: A collective artwork for and by the conference community

Note: Participants do not have to be good at art to participate. Participation in the collective art installation is voluntary.