APHN concluded its 2020 quarterly webinar series on 17th November 2020 with a session about Emergencies in Palliative Care by Dr Shirlynn Ho (Singapore).
Dr Shirlynn Ho is a palliative care physician at the National Cancer Centre Singapore, with clinical experience in both tertiary hospital as well as community settings. She is interested in fostering clinical collaborations between different institutions across settings to bring about greater access to quality palliative care. Her experience as head of medical service in Assisi Hospice, as well as her new role as director of clinical services in the SingHealth Duke Supportive and Palliative Care Centre, allowed her to pursue this cause. She had also been involved in various Lien Centre for Palliative Care programmes aimed at training and capacity building in the Asia Pacific Region, and is currently the lead for the programme for Bhutan from 2018.
It was a fruitful session as Dr Ho touched on how to recognise what constituted as palliative care emergencies, presented two case studies for participants to learn about decision making in palliative care emergencies and so much more.
The participants then proceeded to ask Dr Ho their questions over Zoom during the Question and Answer segment. Dr Ho answered many insightful questions before concluding the session.
This webinar garnered over 700 participants from more than 20 different regions.
Prior to the pandemic, our host sites were able to screen the webinar in their institution’s seminar rooms for those interested to gather and watch. This was to facilitate discussions and networking after the webinar. This time round, some of our host sites managed to host the webinar session for their department (mainly online due to the covid-19 restrictions in their region). One host site even managed to relay the webinar session to all their participants who joined in from their end as part of their event
For the year of 2020, APHN opened its member’s only exclusive webinar for anyone in the world to attend. Given the global COVID-19 pandemic, many may have encountered difficulties gaining access to resources on palliative care. We recognised the need to share educational material to benefit others especially during these times. Albeit different from in-person or bedside teaching, it provided opportunities for many to learn and ask questions from experts in the field.
Thank you to everyone who joined in our webinar sessions this year and we hope you enjoyed them as much as we did!
Note: In 2021, our quarterly webinar series will return to being accessible to APHN members only. If you wish to attend our 2021 webinar series, please register for APHN individual or organisational membership: https://aphn.org/membership/
If you are an active APHN organisational member, you can join us as a host site for future webinars! Drop us an email at aphn@aphn.org to find out more.
In 2020, we brought you these four webinar topics:
- Education Capacity in Asia Pacific: An Overview by Professor Patsy Yates, Australia
- Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crisis by Dr Joan Marston, South Africa
- Communications by Dr Santosh Chaturvedi, India
- Emergencies in Palliative Care by Dr Shirlynn Ho, Singapore
If you missed any of these sessions, you can access the archive of all our previous recorded webinar sessions here (only available to APHN members).
Written by: Trudy Giam (APHN Executive ), Edited by: Djin Tay (APHN Volunteer)