OCHER

The annual research workshop on clinical communication, OCHER 2024, will be held at Thon Hotel Arena January 10-12. This time OCHER features three keynote speakers; Rebecca Barnes, Paul K J Han, and Lorraine Noble.  They will cover conversation analytic perspectives on general practice, verbal signaling behaviours, and uncertainty’s impact on doctor-patient communication.

Rebecca Barnes, associate professor at the University of Oxford

Her talks will be on:

• The management of primary health care in interaction: A retrospective
• Applying Conversation Analysis: Practical steps towards making an impact on healthcare

Lorraine Noble, professor at the University College London and also the current president of EACH International Association on Communication in Healthcare

Her talks will be on:

• Examining power by counting doctors’ verbal markers of structure
• Exploring whether doctors mean what they say

Paul K J Han, senior scientist at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

His talks will be on:

• The nature and management of medical uncertainty
• Understanding medical uncertainty: the importance of language and a linguistic approach

Please spread this information. Information about abstract submission and registration will soon appear on this website, and will also be distributed to former participants in this annual workshop.

The research group of EACH International Association on Communication in Healthcare (www.each.international), has initiated a webinar series on connectivity for researchers in the field. April 21, the presenter will be OCHER lead Pål Gulbrandsen. The title is “It’s all about curiosity and trying to understand”, and he will describe how medical training de-learnt his curiosity for people, and how clinical practice resurrected it. The link to the webinar and registration here.

We added about 70 new publications to our list since August 9, 2021.

OCHER 2024 will be held at Thon Hotel Arena in Lillestrøm, Norway January 10-12, 2024. Note the following important dates:

Abstract deadline: September 20, 2023. Notification of accept: October 4, 2023. Registration deadline: October 13, 2023. This year we will use an online registration form.

We hope to be able to announce plenary speakers by May 1.

At January 31st at 5 PM Central European Time, Jennifer Gerwing is to present her talk “Appreciating the role of relationships in research” at the rEACH Connectivity Webinar Series. rEACH is the research group of the EACH International Association for Communication in Healthcare. A flyer for the talk:  Flyer_Jennifer-Gerwing January 31 2023. There is a link to the registration form also.

After two years of cancellations because of the pandemic, this 10th OCHER research workshop on clinical communication has attracted almost 60 participants from eight countries. The program is tighter than ever, but we keep the normal scheduling – two parallel sessions with 30 min slots (10 min presentations + 20 min Q/A and discussions. Plenary speakers Sandra van Dulmen and Sarah Bigi (author of the book Communication (with) Care) will give two lectures each. We will also have a plenary workshop led by Gregory Makoul.

The full program (PDF document) is updated January 6th and is now available. Note that the venue has changed to Thon Hotel Arena in Lillestrøm as our normal venue hosts Ukrainian refugees.

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.