About this speaker
During my undergraduate years at Guys Hospital in the early 80s, I recall a newly diagnosed cancer patient being told, “There is nothing more we can do, you need to go home and get your affairs in order’. This proved to be a watershed moment that led to my foundation fellowship in the Chapter of Palliative Medicine some 20 years later.
I have been active in teaching communication and compassion skills since 1990, and that training initially revolved around Rogerian humanistic principles. As medical curricula developed particularly regarding soft-skills training, it was clear to me that compassion was a core skill of palliative care that could be taught and developed. Surprisingly the argument that compassion was an innate attribute that could not be learned persisted and seems only recently to have been put to bed.
In the last decade in response to challenges in my workplace, I studied models of adaptive communication and conflict, becoming a certified trainer in the ‘Process Communication Model’ and ‘Leading Out of Drama®’. Notably, I recognise understanding more about compassion from studying the dynamics of conflict, than I learned in 30 years of studying, practising and teaching palliative medicine.
