Agora is organising a preconference on Wednesday 14 June before to the 18th World Congress of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) in Rotterdam (15-17 June) on the theme Public Health Palliative Care in the Netherlands, palliative care in the social domain and from local communities.
In palliative care, in the last phase of a person’s life, an important role is played by the social environment, network, and local community around the person in the palliative phase. The focus is on the person, not the disease.
But we see familiar forms of social communities being lost more and more. For instance, due to secularisation, families living further apart than before, and neighbours no longer know each other. So where and with whom do you find support in your last phase of life? Can we expect professionals or a (local) government to fill that gap? Or will we increasingly rely on benevolent volunteers and citizens’ initiatives such as compassionate communities? Do such civic initiatives already exist? What do these communities look like? And what can we learn from them?
The preconference ‘Connecting Communities in the Netherlands’ addresses these questions and also shows examples of beautiful civic initiatives and compassionate communities, among others filmed in the city of Rotterdam.