News & Updates
Letter from Jill Thornton, AHPCC President
Updates from the president can be found here.
2025 AGM
Our 2025 AGM meeting will be held online on the 12th May, at 2pm. Members should have been notified about this by email, which will have included the link to join the meeting. The agenda can be found here, and minutes from last year’s AGM can be found here.
CHCC Conference 2025
Bookings are now open for the 2025 CHCC Conference: “Beyond Bandages: Cultivating health and wellbeing through our professional practice. The conference will run from the 6th to the 8th October at Yarnfield Park Training & Conference Centre.
For more information and booking, please see our Training Events and Conferences page.
What is to Become of Me? – Exploring Contemporary Responses to Total Pain and Suffering
St Christopher’s Hospice
9th-10th July 2025
Tickets start at £85+VAT
This thought-provoking event will be led by Heather Richardson, former CEO and Director of Education & Community Action at St Christopher’s, alongside Dr Reverend Andrew Goodhead.
Across the two days, you’ll hear from a diverse line-up of speakers offering global, national, and local perspectives on the concept of total pain in today’s world. You’ll also have the opportunity to explore the Ubuntu Exhibition from Brazil and contribute to a digital book sharing reflections and memories of Dame Cicely Saunders. Central to Dame Cicely’s legacy is the concept of “total pain” – a ground-breaking historical notion that recognises the multi-dimensional nature of suffering experienced by people who are dying. As society evolves, so too does the experience of suffering, making it vital to revisit and expand upon this concept.
For more information and to book, please refer to our Training Events and Conferences page.
Hospice UK National Conference: Share Your Work and Ideas
Do you have new, innovative and impactful work that you would like to share with others working in hospice and end of life care?
Each year people from across the hospice, palliative and end of life care sector showcase their work at Hospice UK’s National Conference through the Call for Papers.
The Call for Papers invites anyone with interesting research or work to share to submit an abstract about their project. Successful submissions are included in the conference as part of the poster display or as an oral presentation.
Visit Hospice UK’s website to submit your work and find tips and advice on writing an abstract. The call for papers closes at midday on 13 May 2025.
New to writing abstracts? Hospice UK can help!
Hospice UK offer mentoring opportunities to support those less familiar with writing abstracts. A panel of volunteer mentors can share their knowledge and experience and help would-be authors to increase the chance of their work being accepted for presentation. Evaluations of this scheme show that all of the authors who have taken part benefitted from the mentorship. Contact Melanie Taylor to find out more: m.taylor@hospiceuk.org.
Hospice UK’s National Conference returns to Liverpool on 25 – 27 November 2025. Register your interest and be the first to know when booking opens.
Study Day on 5th June – “Making Our Cases: Using Story and Data to Demonstrate Value”
One of the challenges for healthcare chaplaincy is to develop ways of demonstrating the benefit, impact and value of our care. Chaplains’ work often relates to more intangible aspects of patient and staff care, which can be difficult to quantify and measure using traditional healthcare metrics. This study day (supported by the AHPCC and the Free Churches Group) is open to anyone to attend and will explore different and creative ways to showcase the positive influence of chaplaincy services.
Confirmed speakers include:
- Mark Evans, National Adviser for Spiritual Care in the Scottish Government on ‘Developing a Minimum Data Set in Scotland’.
- Frin Lewis-Smith, specialist chaplain for oncology and palliative care at Leeds Teaching Hospitals on ‘Spiritual pain by Numbers?’
- Steve Nolan Bereavement & Spiritual Care Lead, Princess Alice Hospice and Visiting Research Fellow at University of Winchester on ‘Learning from Case Studies.’
- Clare Pye, Research & Innovation Manager at St Luke’s Hospice in Sheffield
Alongside speaker presentations, the day will include live storytelling from a number of chaplains as a way of exploring how stories can connect, challenge, inspire and validate us. For more information and booking, please visit our Training Events and Conferences page.
Regarding the AHPCC’s Future
Earlier this year, Karen Murphy wrote a letter to our membership, presenting options for the AHPCC’s future, to be voted on at this year’s AGM. You can find the letter here.
Chaplaincy Forum Update
The Chaplaincy Forum met on the 21st January, and shared five points for dissemination. You can read them on our UKBHC and other Organisations page.
Monthly Online Living Room
Leti Hawthorn is hosting an informal monthly meeting for chaplains. Upcoming dates are 1st April, 7th May, 3rd June and 2nd July.
For more information, or to sign up, please email secretary@ahpcc.org.uk.
Religion & Media Briefing: Where next for the Assisted Dying Bill?
The AHPCC was invited to be represented on a discussion arranged by the Religion and Media Centre following on from the Assisted Dying Bill debate. Karen Murphy was able to take part in the discussion on behalf of hospice chaplains working ‘in the field’. Karen writes that while it felt that academic voices were the strongest in the conversation, it was good to take part and offer some insight from our work and the issues we face.
Briefing: Where next for the Assisted Dying Bill?
‘Thought for the day’ from Tom Gordon
Tom Gordon was the president of the AHPCC for some years, and has published several books since retiring. He has also continued to produce a daily thought every day since March 2020.
You can find Tom’s thought for today, and for previous days, here
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If you’re new to this website…
Whether you’ve worked in palliative care for years or you’re new in post, we hope you find this website helpful. It’s regularly updated, and alerts also appear on Facebook, especially for new vacancies. Contributions of articles and resources are welcome. New items appear on this page for six to eight weeks, but after that, you can still find most of them in the main body of the website. Gary and Tim.
In your prayers today please remember the patients, staff and volunteers of [cw_daily_quotes]
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