Living life and facing death
It’s one of the assured guarantees in life that we all have to face but conversely a subject not all of us feel comfortable talking about.
In January we hosted an event at our conference venue in Cornwall that dealt head on with the subject of dying.
Healthwatch Cornwall had exclusive use of our Conference Centre to welcome 130 people to talk about the practicalities involved in end of life planning and care.
Peninsula Community Health, Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, and Cornwall Hospice Care presented on good practice for care professionals, and the challenges faced in caring for people at the end of their life.
Talking Outside of the Box, an organisation that encourages people to talk candidly about death, hosted workshops on planning a funeral and the financial, legal and emotional aspects.
Ian Dibb CEO and founder of Once I’ve Gone attended one of the worshops.
This was a fantastic event. There were industry care professionals sitting alongside members of the public openly discussing end of life planning. I’d love to see more of these events which are so essential to allowing people to talk openly about end of life.
An art exhibition, A Graceful Death, creatively dealt with the topic, with paintings and drawings depicting people at the end of life and snapshots of their last messages and stories about their lives.
Debbie Pritchard from Healthwatch Cornwall said the day was instigated following research into end of life care.
We’re so pleased our conference was such a success, from the incredible speakers, guests and Healthwatch Cornwall staff, to the conference centre team. The strategic aim of the day was to bring together people who work within care services to move towards the creation and implementation of an End-of-Life Charter for Cornwall.
Enthusiasm for the event has been tremendous and we are confident that by uniting, we’ll ultimately be providing more joined up end-of-life care that will ensure everyone can have a good death.
It was quite a colossal event with exclusive use of our venue over 3 floors with our event manager Stef ensuring everything ran smoothly.
The day itself wasn’t sad or depressing like you might expect. And the art exhibition was incredibly positive, it seemed to be more about individuals, and life and love, rather than death.
Find out more about the work being done by Healthwatch Cornwall.
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