International perspectives on specialized palliative care services' engagement with the community: questioning our assumptions

The field of public health in palliative care (PHPC) is based on the premise that collaboration with communities is essential for health-promoting PC. In line with this, there is also an assumption that specialized PC services need to have interactions with the communities that they serve, not only educating the public but also reciprocal learning. Our experiences as an international group working together for several years to develop a PHPC research agenda, have led us to recognize that the adoption of these ideas is context dependent. In this workshop, we will present results of an international comparative survey of specialist PC services' attitudes and activities with the general public, conducted across Belgium, Sweden and the UK. We are interested in stimulating discussion with participants to question our common assumptions about what palliative care services are already doing in terms of community engagement and further develop the field, with consideration given to the conditions and needs in different contexts. We will intersperse short research-based presentations with participatory research approaches, e.g. world café format, to generate interaction and discussion. This workshop is based on principles of knowledge exchange with mutual learning for both presenters and participants. After this workshop, we expect to have learned about:
- Context-specific attitudes and norms facilitating and hindering PC services' engagement with the public
- Policy and organizational level factors affecting such engagement
- Positive examples from different contexts
- Different approaches for understanding and further investigating this area
- Ideas for positive impact in our national and local environments.
As much of PHPC derives from the English-speaking world, the workshop aims to be thought-provoking about how we transfer assumptions, knowledge and experiences regarding community engagement from palliative care services from one setting to another. We will also generate ideas and approaches about community engagement and future research of relevance for a variety of countries and cultures.