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National Palliative Care Week Breakfast 2024
May 21 @ 6:45 am - 9:00 am
Sharing the Care – Health professionals or community: which group comes first in a compassionate communities’ approach to care?
Tickets are now on sale for our annual National Palliative Care Week sector breakfast on Tuesday 21 May 2024 in Perth, Bunbury and Albany. To book your place visit HERE.
The topic this year will be Sharing the Care – Health professionals or community: which group comes first in a compassionate communities approach to care? See the program HERE.
Our guest speakers are compassionate communities champions Dr Julian Abel and Professor Samar Aoun. They will be joined for a panel discussion with representatives from clinical and community backgrounds, including Dr Alison Parr, Gabriella Jerrat and Michelle Elson. See the speaker and panel member profiles HERE.
Dr Julian Abel
Dr Julian Abel became a consultant in palliative care 2001, working initially at a district general hospital and a hospice. For more than a decade he has become increasingly involved in finding ways of building compassionate communities around people at end of life. He has run projects at local, regional and national levels, and was Vice President of Public Health Palliative Care International. He is an international keynote speaker and has published regularly on models of public health palliative care. Abel and Professor Allan Kellehear are the editors of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care.
Since 2016, he has worked with Frome Medical Practice in Somerset in developing a new model of primary care combined with compassionate communities. The health outcomes of this model have been dramatic, with this being the first intervention that has been effective in reducing whole population emergency admissions. Compassionate communities is one of the most effective therapeutic tools we have in improving length of life and well being. Along with Professor Kellehear, he has formed Compassionate Communities UK, which he is Director. The charity has been formed to develop the broader roll out compassionate communities in primary care and public health palliative and end-of-life care. Projects are underway in multiple areas in the UK and internationally.
Dr Julian Abel is joint author of The Compassion Project, along with the prize winning novelist Lindsay Clarke. The book describes the background to the Frome Project, its implementation and the wider implications of the application of compassion both in medicine and in society at large. He runs a podcast, Survival of the Kindest about compassion, its presence, its absence and the consequences of both.
Professor Samar Aoun
Professor Samar Aoun is Perron Institute Research Chair in Palliative Care at the University of Western Australia, Head of Palliative Care Research at Perron Institute, adjunct professor at La Trobe University and Chair of Compassionate Communities Australia.
Samar is an international leader in the promotion and advocacy of public health approaches to palliative care and led this approach for those living with grief and bereavement. She is known as an innovator and a champion of practice and policy translation of public health science for palliative care.
Her work on social models in bereavement support has provided empirical evidence to strengthen the Compassionate Communities approach to care. She co-founded the South West Compassionate Communities Network and led the Compassionate Connectors program which offered the practical and social support needed by families with life limiting illnesses, with community citizens working alongside palliative care and chronic disease teams. The program significantly improved social connectedness and reduced hospital admissions.
She is a current board member of Palliative Care WA and a past president of the Motor Neurone Disease (MND) Association in Western Australia and MND Australia. Internationally, she is a member of Public Health Palliative Care International and the Public Health Palliative Care reference group of the European Association of Palliative Care. She was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2003 from the Prime Minister of Australia, received in 2018 the Medal for Excellence from the European Society for Person Centred Healthcare and was recently awarded the 2023 WA Australian of the Year.
