OCHER

We have received 32 abstracts, very interesting topics indeed. This year we have more participants from Sweden than before. By today altogether 51 participants are registered, including local faculty and keynote speakers. Participants may expect the final program to be posted within two weeks.

We are now happy to disclose that we have been able to recruit three keynote speakers to OCHER 2018, following our intention to increase the maximum number of participants in the workshop to 60. Previously, we have presented Kathryn Pollak, an expert on the study of motivational interviewing in disease prevention, and Douglas Maynard, a leading expert on conversation analysis in medicine, both will attend the workshop. Today, we can also present Anne Stiggelbout,  a distinguished expert on shared decision making. In combination, the three of them cover a wide range of communication research challenges, and we look forward to their presentations and participation as discussants in the parallel sessions.

We have now made our biannual update of the publication list of OCHER members working in Norway. This time we have added 19 new papers to the list, and we have updated earlier papers with print references. This demonstrates the high output of research coming from this group. 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), limited backward to 1 Dec 2016.

The dates for the 7th international OCHER research workshop on clinical communication are now fixed: January 10-12, 2018. The venue will, as always, be at Hotel Triaden, Lørenskog, Norway. Right outside Oslo and very conveniently placed about half an hour from Oslo airport. We are working on keynote speakers, they will be announced in August.

This year’s International Conference on Communication in Healthcare will be held in Baltimore, Maryland on October 8-11. It is hosted by the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare in collaboration with the Health Literacy Annual Research Conference and is expected to have 6-800 participants. Other keynotes are Eliseo J. Pérez Stable, Marianne Schmid Mast, and Lisa Cooper. Read more about the conference here.

The 6th international OCHER workshop was finished on Friday 13 with very positive evaluation. There were 50 participants, the usual format with 30 minute slots for presenters including discussion. This year’s OCHER featured the first plenary workshop with four groups and interactive discussions. Jette Ammentorp led this workshop with success. The evaluation was unequivocal that OCHER is an extremely valuable meeting place with a good format, which encourages more international collaboration and at the same time provides a good place for young researchers to make their first presentations.

The OCHER publications list has been updated with 30 new papers since June 2016.

Eirik H. Ofstad developed over the years 2010-2o15 the Decision Identification and Classification Taxonomy for Use in Medicine (DICTUM) in his doctoral work. This tool aims to identify all medical decisions that emerge as statements in physician-patient interactions. The taxonomy operates with two dimensions, the type of decision, of which there are ten kinds, and the temporal nature of decisions, of which there are three different ones, those made ahead of the interaction (preformed), those made in the interaction (present), and those that are conditional, that is, expressed as possible to make in the future depending on the course. You will find the DICTUM codebook on the resources page on this website.

We have received more than 30 abstracts and more than 40 registrations for this year’s OCHER conference, and the quality of the abstracts are very promising. Participants are from the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Norway. You will find the program here: detailed-program-6th-ocher-2017.

Vikki Entwistle is professor of health services research at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and has done extensive research on patient participation in decision making (besides many other important engagements). J. Randall Curtis is a professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also an adjunct professor of Bioethics and Humanities and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Professor Curtis has provided us with the titles of his two lectures in the 6th research workshop on January 11-13. They are as follows: “Measuring and improving communication about palliative care: What have we learned and where do we go from here?” and “Communication and decision-making with families of critically ill patients: Lessons from the successes and failures”. They are well placed in the core of what we are working with in the OCHER community.