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The 10th OCHER research workshop on clinical communication has been cancelled two years in a row due to the pandemic. This seems to have boosted interest in the workshop, at least regarding the number of submitted abstracts, which we have received from seven countries. We are happy to see that several clinical and non-clinical types of research are represented. The deadline is now overdue, and all authors should have received notification of accept.  Some of the presenters have been placed in plenary sessions.

Please note that you need to register. In the letter of acceptance you will have received the registration form as an attachment. The deadline is October 5, so please do not hesitate to register. After registration, your institution or you will receive an invoice, depending on your information in the registration form. Please note that we need exact information of how many will attend because of the capacity of the hotel.

Any inquiry about further procedures should be addressed to pal.gulbrandsen@medisin.uio.no.

We are now preparing OCHER 2023 which will be held January 11-13, 2023 at its usual venue Thon Hotel Triaden, Norway. Keynote speakers will be Sandra van Dulmen and Sarah Bigi.

Please note these deadlines: Abstract – September 15. Accept will be decided by September 30. Registration deadline October 3. Maximum number of participants – 60.

Further information will be published soon.

ICCH is the most important event in clinical communication research and teaching annually. For those who cannot travel to Glasgow, there is an online program which will feature 2 parallel streams with unique oral and workshop sessions. It will further allow viewing registrations of the keynotes and of a selection of in-person oral sessions (including an innovation – a debate!). There will be a live Q&A with each of the keynote speakers, and online networking sessions. Moreover, all posters of the conference can be viewed online and live poster pitches will be offered. All in-person attendees have access to the online program, and registrations of sessions will remain available until 2 weeks after the conference. The final in-person and online programs will be finalized in the coming two weeks. The latest version of the programs can be found here.

The early-bird rate is still available until July 22. All OCHER participants and everyone else interested in what goes on in clinical communication research should attend. Registration here.

Professor Saul Weiner of University of Illinois Chicago, author of the book “Listening for what matters” (with Alan Schwartz) and 2020 keynote speaker at ICCH, has produced a set of videos on the concept contextualized care. We have been allowed to post a link here to the set of videos, which are relatively short, didactic, and nice to see in a sequence. Recently (May 2022) Weiner has updated his series of videos with one that demonstrates how teachers can add context in a fruitful way to clinical cases.

We regret to inform that due to the last severe governmental restrictions in Norway because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we will again have to cancel the workshop. This time too late for us to avoid financial implications, but at least we can assure all registered participants that they will get their registration fees refunded.

We emphasize that we will not surrender, and have already planned to arrange another workshop on January 11-13, 2023. We hope that all 48 registered participants will return, and also invite interested colleagues to attend this very special conference, where projects are presented in an early phase to get international feedback. All presenters have 30 minutes of attention for their project, 10 min for presentation and 20 min for discussion.

The workshop has also time scheduled for developing research projects across countries, disciplines, and fields of inquiry. We encourage interdisciplinary work.

We can assure all who have submitted abstracts and received a mail of acceptance, that OCHER 2022 will not be cancelled. We received more than 40 registrations, which is sufficient to fund the event. However, in an earlier post we forecasted that invoices would be sent to participants right after acceptance of abstracts, but there has been some delay in that process. We will send invoices as soon as possible, and the payment deadline will be 14 days after issue of your invoice.

We look forward to see you all at Thon Hotel Triaden in January.

We have received more than 30 abstracts for the OCHER 2022 workshop, from Canada, Germany, The Netherlands and the Nordic countries. The workshop will take place on January 12-14 at Thon Hotel Triaden, Lørenskog, Norway. An e-mail of acceptance has now been sent to all accepted abstract submitters. If you have not received an e-mail, please contact us immediately. We remind you that a registration form must be submitted by October 4. If less than 40 registrations are received, we will have to cancel the workshop. Hopefully, this will not happen as travel restrictions are now expected to be less rigid.

We have today sent an invitation e-mail with the program and registration form for OCHER 2022. Those who have received this e-mail may share it with other researchers in the field of communication in healthcare. We hope to see 60 participants in January for the “jubilee” version – the 10th international research workshop on communication.

Please note that the deadline for abstracts is September 14. Notification of acceptance will come no later than October 1, and registration deadline is October 4. You will then receive an invoice from Akershus University Hospital (Akershus universitetssykehus). Whether it is to be paid by your institution or yourself, please make sure the correct address is given in the registration form. Deadline for payment is October 18.

Abstracts should be sent to Pål Gulbrandsen (pal.gulbrandsen@medisin.uio.no) and registration forms to Reidun Skårerhøgda (reidun.skarerhogda@ahus.no).

If we receive less than 25 abstracts or if we will receive less than 40 registrations, we will cancel the workshop. This has not happened before except last year, due to the pandemic. We hope the pandemic subsides and that travel restrictions will be less strict this year, We wish you all wellcome!

We have now made our update of the publication list of OCHER members working in Norway. This time we have added 54 papers to the list. Search term used in PubMed is (Gulbrandsen P OR Finset A OR Eide H OR Svennevig J OR Gerwing J OR Ofstad EH OR Kasper J OR Steinsbekk A OR Menichetti J OR Lie HC), limited backward to 2 July 2020. This search returned 129 papers, but some were already included, and some were not related to OCHER (Kasper J includes several other authors than “our” Kasper).

We aim to arrange the 10th OCHER research workshop in January 2022 and cross fingers for the pandemic to have subsided sufficiently for an in-person meeting.  Both keynote speakers Marie-Anne Durand and Sarah Bigi have agreed to present as was planned for the 2021 workshop which we unfortunately had to cancel because of the pandemic. Bigi works at the Catholic University of Milan, and Durand at the Universities of Toulouse and Lausanne. They represent two radically different but equally important approaches to the study of interactions in medicine, and will definitely add new understanding to our community.

You may expect deadline for abstracts to be September 14, and acceptance will be received by October 1. Registration deadline will be October 4, and deadline for payment will be October 18.

Bigi’s talks:

“Models of interaction in healthcare communication studies: the missing link between theory and practice” – Based on argumentation theory, she will argue in favor of a distinction between models of communication and paradigms of care, which sometimes in the healthcare communication literature seem to be confused or conflated.

“What are people doing when they talk? Challenges in assessing what ‘good communication’ looks like” – She asks: how do we assess the quality of communication if we want to use discursive criteria (and not, for example, patient satisfaction or perceptions)? How can we assess what people are ‘doing to each other’ with their utterances if we cannot analyze people’s intentions? And how do we distinguish between argumentation and explanation in real-life dialogues?

Durand’s talks:

“What Matters Most: Randomized Controlled Trial of Breast Cancer Surgery Conversation Aids Across Socioeconomic Strata” – about the effect of a paper-based pictorial conversation aid (pictures+ text) to patients with early-stage breast cancer. They studied effects across socioeconomic strata as well as between surgeons applying the aids.

“Implementing patient-centered innovations in healthcare: from theory to practice” – about the main implementation frameworks and examples of their use.