This two-day professional workshop will provide participants with a unique opportunity to learn and experience a novel and clinically robust Family Dignity Intervention (FDI) for cultivating existential wholeness among terminally-ill patients and their families facing the end of life. FDI is founded upon an empirical foundation on dignified palliative care in Asia and informed by Dignity Therapy; it comprises a highly-focus meaning-oriented interview with individual patient-caregiver dyad that is recorded, transcribed, and edited into a legacy document for sharing with the dyad’s family. A recent Randomized Controlled Trial with 140 participants provided strong evidence of FDI’s efficacy in improving patients’ quality of life, hope, positive life outlook and life meaning, as well as for decreasing caregivers’ stress and depressive symptoms while elevating quality of life and positive life outlook. FDI is an innovative and effective intervention for advancing holistic palliative care in Singapore.

Through mini-lectures, role-plays, hands-on practices, experiential exercises and case sharing, participants will learn the theoretical foundation, clinical skills and techniques of FDI for facilitating open and compassionate dialogue between patients and their carers that promote appreciation and reconciliation, foster relational bonds, and elicit transgenerational wisdoms to be shared across generations through the creation of a family legacy document. Participants will also learn ways to incorporate FDI into the provision of Advance Care Planning.

The Wilson Centre of the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the National Healthcare Group (NHG) in Singapore, are proud to offer a four-day intensive programme in qualitative research for health professionals working in clinical academic contexts. Participants will have the opportunity to hone their research skills through guided seminars, skill-building workshops and exercises led by some of the world’s most respected health professions education researchers. The programme will be conducted in Singapore’s Novena Health City, an inspiring environment for learning and application.

The two-day course aims to develop participants’ theoretical and practical knowledge in delivering competent, evidence-informed palliative care in advanced dementia.

At the end of the course, participants should be able to:

• Identify key ethical principles that arise in end-of-life care, focusing on a community setting
• Describe the common ethical issues that arise in end-of-life care
• Analyse common ethical issues that arise in end-of-life care using the relevant tools