News & Updates

Letter from Jill Thornton, AHPCC President

Updates from the president can be found here.

Hospice UK Workshop – Coping with Professional Grief

Hospice UK are running a workshop about coping with professional grief, on the 8th May. This practical and interactive workshop is recommended for people managing and supporting frontline staff who may frequently experience loss in their roles. For more information and a retreat programme, 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.

The Dark Night of the Soul: Transformative Spiritual Suffering

This is an interactive short course, run by the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge, comprised of four sessions that build consecutively upon each other over four Saturdays (online). The course introduces the spiritual theology of the Dark Night of the Soul, inviting practitioners’ exploration of spiritual suffering within personal and professional practice contexts.

Please find the booking link on our Training Events and Conferences page.

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.

2025 Membership Renewal Letter from The Treasurer

You can now join or renew your membership for 2025 by downloading the membership forms, available here.

Dear AHPCC member

We have reached that time of year when we ask for your annual membership subscriptions. As we do so, we are aware of the context in which we find ourselves this year. Due to the recent vote on the private members bill regarding assisted dying, the hospice sector is receiving much needed attention regarding the financial pressures across the sector. Of course, this comes at a time when there are also national and local pressures on the public purse. Perhaps this has also impacted your personal situation. Like most organisations AHPCC is not immune to these pressures.

The impact on AHPCC is becoming apparent in the following ways:

1. Slow or late take up of membership.
2. Decisions individuals and hospices are making regarding covering of conference fees.

At present membership costs £45 annually and provides members with access to Regional groups and for those elected, representation of AHPPC internally and externally. As well as the website resources, reduced conference fees and peer support.

Option of monthly standing order payment

We would like to offer a monthly standing order (STO) option for paying membership fees, in the hope that this offers some assistance in the future.

This would involve more administration. So we propose a monthly fee of £4 to cover the annual fee and contribution of 0.25p toward the additional administration costs.

We would anticipate notifying you annually that your renewal is due, so that you can continue or stop your standing order should you choose this option.

You will need to set up the standing order yourself with your bank and our bank details can be found on the membership form.

In order to reduce administration and the number of times we contact you, we will send an annual renewal notice, then follow this up on a maximum of two occasions, one month apart, after which we will send you an email to let you know that your membership has lapsed.

In the event of lapsed membership

The membership year will still run from 1st January – 31st December. However, if your membership lapses, we will let our Regional reps know, so you are removed from the records in keeping with data protection legislation and you will no longer be able to access the group.

This will also impact your ability to remain on the Executive Committee, if that applies to you.

It will always be possible to renew your membership, should you wish to do so. However, we will require that you do this in a timely manner to respect the time and effort it takes to attend to all of this administration.

If you would like to come back to me, Sue or any member of the Executive committee on any of the above, we would be pleased to hear from you.

Warm wishes
Lucyann
AHPCC Treasurer

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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AHPCC Membership

Is your AHPCC membership paid up and current? If you wish to join the AHPCC or renew your membership, you can download the Membership Form here. Membership is for the calendar year, but applications received after October 1 will cover the new year.

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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.

Praying In your prayers today please remember the patients, staff and volunteers of [cw_daily_quotes]

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