by Dr Ollie Minton, Consultant Palliative Medicine, Brighton, UK
Ei kukaan ole seppä syntyessään – Nobody is a blacksmith at birth, meaning learning takes time and dedication.
Welcome back my fellow travellers tempus fugit or whatever the Finnish version is another conference completed (2024 already buried in the archives) Vicky Cristina Hola Barcelona – BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care
This time we all travelled to beautiful Helsinki.
A big and spacious conference venue awaited. With a red slide at the front, those brave enough to go down may have ended up with beer or bubble gum on their trousers.
Are we fighting fit for the future – to be confirmed at multiple further World Health Organisation seminars with our technical advisers- or not? At some point we will need to take the geological view as a year doesn’t give much opportunity but this was the global celebration of palliative care complete with an updated atlas The EAPC Atlas of Palliative Care in the European Region 2025 – EAPC
I kept humming: “Islands in the stream That is what we are; No one in between”: the mood does take over when several thousand get together and chat science education and policy – and many abstracts all of which can be found here: The 19th World Congress of the European Association for Palliative Care 29 – 31 May 2025 Helsinki, Finland, 2025
Lovely to see so many physical posters and be able to do some deep dives into people’s QI, research and project work.
Oh, there’s a moomin coffee and a nice welcome and how to Sauna!
Ok, I will have to talk about this. As a UK citizen like myself, you still have to get your Brexit passport stamp, but then you can sauna your way ‘ad nauseam’ through the Schengen zone. Outside the conference centre itself, there was a lot of choice. Beware naked Germans, is all I say! Much tutting if you are not in the nip, and a small towel is the only self-defence you have! The nudism enthusiasts and zealots will shop you in if you are not naked, so be prepared to drop everything or leave (red-faced and sweaty). How very un-British.
Also, everything here is served with loganberry. And it is rather delicious. For other top tips on the Nordic way of life see the Scandi kitchen blogs ScandiKitchen Blog – ScandiKitchen which I subscribe to.
We had a great welcome: got off to a City Hall reception 500 years of (458 sorry) of the city and welcome by the mayor and the holistic world of palliative care.
Also noting there are 130 km of waterfront trails being built all the time so that man is not an island – in Finland you automatically become islands in the stream!
The opening plenary rightly acknowledged the empty rocking chair of two giants Dr Robert Twycross and Dr Anne Merriman plus the health minister and traditional songs.
Almost immediately followed by early integration, education and regulation watchword bingo. The card was filled early with the pillars of research education and regulation building the foundations for a full house
We rightly need to look after our biases and the global problems of conflicts rightly deserve being given to stage the Atlas can only highlight variations and problems. It does not give us necessarily solutions or funding
Education research and policy will always be the pillars of what we do. There were no blockbuster interventions or drugs this time. We can plan for the future but how advance(d) or not any plans will get remains to be seen.
The physical presence of a poster hall reminded me that the more things change the more they stay the same or as moomin-momma observed “But one needs a change sometimes. We take everything too much for granted, including each other”.
They’ll always be more things to do but they’ll always be in the moment coffee chat going to the beer garden seeing the sea Fortress the sea the seagulls
There will also be Prague 2026 when perhaps we really will be able to get the virtual reality empathy levels right rather than just breaking bad news. Here, we witnessed some next level gamification of VR in education, and how to break bad news to an avatar. Interesting to watch this area develop, and cultural and national differences needing to be built into any VR comms skills!
There will be always be a need for advocacy and where best to fit palliative care into undergraduate and postgraduate and societal education. I took that away and we still have to work out where computers fit into our professional lives big data (yes still a thing) generative AI and beyond indeed into our afterlife and ongoing digital immortality. The avatars may be better year on year but the digital gulf widens for those without access.
Until 2026 where maybe we can ask ChatGPT to model all the different ways and see what actually works whether it’s bow-tie ski slope ,champagne bottle Mobius strip or something else.
This is why we need an annual get together to keep promoting what we do given that we’re all mortal!!
“Oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka” – Your own land is a strawberry, another one is a blueberry. Or Loganberry!
Competing interest: none declared
