Programme

WELCOME PROGRAMME PRACTICAL SPEAKERS

Day 1: Compassionate Communities & Community-based participatory research

Day 2: Evaluating public health palliative care interventions: processes and outcomes

Day 3: What can we learn from epidemiology for public health palliative care research 

Day 4: Translating research to practice (valorisation of health promoting palliative care)

Theme 2: Evaluating public health palliative care interventions: processes and outcomes

Chairs/speakers: Joachim Cohen (Belgium), Hanne Bakelants (Belgium), Anne Van Driessche (Belgium)

Outline of the workshop 

Public health palliative care interventions, such as Compassionate Communities, are on an upswing internationally. The basis for research aiming to describe, understand and evaluate the impact of such approaches remains at an early stage in development. The goal of this workshop is to jointly advance our knowledge of public health research approaches and evaluation designs to capture the complexity of these ‘new’ public health initiatives. The structure of the workshop is based on active involvement of all participants and consist of three main phases: 1) understanding the background of public health research and examining the most used evaluation models/designs; 2) Exploring the complexity of public health palliative care interventions and what this means in terms of evaluation; 3) Collectively examine tools and indicators that are developed to capture the complexity of public health intetventions.  

 Theme 3: What can we learn from epidemiology for public health palliative care research 

Chairs/speakers: Agnes van der Heide (The Netherlands), Joachim Cohen (Belgium)

Outline of the workshop 

Methods and approaches from classic public health and epidemiology can provide important contributions to research around public health palliative care. They offer important insights about the health problems of full communities and populations of dying individuals and those involved and try to address answers about causality. As a result, we recommend that researchers in the field of public health palliative care also consider research methods and tools from this area of public health as options for answering some of their research questions.

The goal of this workshop is to obtain knowledge and understanding about the history of epidemiology, core concepts, and different research designs.

Theme 4: Translating research to practice (valorisation of health promoting palliative care)

Chairs/speakers: Marijke Dheedene (Belgium) and Emma Woodhouse (UK)

Outline of the workshop

This workshop is divided into two parts: (1) what is valorisation and how is it applied at the level of a research group, and (2) what personal impact do I have as a researcher to put my research values and ideas into practice and make changes?

The first part is presented by Marijke Dheedene, valorisation coordinator of the End-of-Life care research group. Research valorisation and impact is an explicit aim of the End-of-Life care research group. The research team has invested profoundly already more than 20 years in developing effective methods for knowledge exchange (KE) with relevant stakeholders and in stimulating the actual use and uptake of knowledge, tools and interventions. The team’s extensive efforts around research valorisation have been recognized, internally for instance by the award for societal valorisation from the VUB, but also externally by excellent evaluations received by funders for the team’s interaction with societal stakeholders in the context of its strategic basic research projects.

Different key elements of this approach in valorisation are presented, next to the evidence-informed models of knowledge transfer and exchange that is used in doing so. Unfortunately, not every valorisation story is a success story with a happy ending, so the pitfalls surrounding valorisation are incorporated as well. This workshop won’t focus on the typical low-hanging fruits or on spicing up a personal CV, but on long-term commitments, projects and realisations. The insights in long-term valorisation can be inspiring for both starting as well as seasoned researchers.

In the second part of this day, we challenge your true personal impact as a researcher: how will I make impact as a researcher, as a caregiver, as a human?

Presented by Emma Woodhouse, Community Action Programme Manager at St Christopher’s Hospice in London, this workshop will look at ways in which research has made changes or can be part of change-making in society. We will consider how as researchers we are not neutral but members of communities, with experiences, values and commitments to the society we live in, which give us opportunities to make our research matter. We’ll look at change-making techniques or principles. We’ll ask, how can our work tackle rather than replicate inequalities? How can our research matter to others? How can we be through research who we want to be as people?

After reviewing some examples of methods and ways that people have created societal change through research agendas, we will set you a series of challenges and we will work together in action groups to design ways to tackle them. At the end of this session, we’ll come together to share our ideas, and create some intentions for the next year. 

* Q&A, junior lectures, meet the expert, … We highly encourage the interactive involvement of early career researchers

More information? please contact endoflifecare@vub.be