You still have time to register for the 2025 Palliative Care Conference in Durban

Excitement is mounting as preparations for the 2025 South African Palliative Care Conference kick up a notch.  The Local Organizing and Scientific Committees have been meeting weekly to ensure the success of the conference, taking place from 18 – 21 June, and that the programme caters to the needs of the broader healthcare community, not only those who work in the field of palliative care.

Amazing lineup of keynote speakers
Invited speakers for the conference include a number of well-known global experts in palliative care, and include:

• Dr Suresh Kumar Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Building Country Capacity in Palliative Care and Long-Term Care, and the Course Director for the International Fellowship in Palliative Care.
• Sr Joan Marston Executive Committee member of PallCHASE (Palliative Care in Humanitarian Aid Situations and Emergencies); Honourary Consultant at Kharkiv National Medical University; Vice-President of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation Global; Founder and Director: Sunflower Children’s Hospice in Bloemfontein and Canon Emeritus: Blackburn Cathedral
• Nokulinda Mkhize A sangoma, author, speaker and mother of 4. She has been practicing as isangoma since 2008 and is an authority in the realms of African cultures, indigenous spiritual knowledge and cosmologies. She is also an accredited integral coach, qualified through the UCT Graduate School of Business.
• Dr Christian Ntizimira Executive Director of the African Center for Research on End-of-Life Care (ACREOL) and Faculty member of the Palliative Care Centre for Excellence in Research and Education (PalC), Singapore, and former City Manager, Kigali at the City Cancer Challenge Foundation.
• Dr Libby Sallnow Associate Professor and Head of Department of the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department at University College London. She works as a palliative medicine physician the community setting for the NHS in London, is a guest professor at the End-of-Life Care Research Group at the Vrije Universiteit in Belgium and an honorary consultant at the WHO collaborating centre in palliative care in Kerala, India.

Please visit the conference website to see the full list of invited speakers.

Durban is the best place to visit in winter
Durban is known to have the warmest winter weather in the whole of South Africa. May to July marks the annual sardine run and delegates to the conference may get to witness the incredible spectacle of birds, dolphins and other sea life that come together to feed off the greatest shoal on earth, consisting of millions of sardines, as they travel upward in the warm water of the Indian Ocean along the East Coast. The conference venue is the stunning landmark Southern Sun Elangeni & Maharani Hotel situated along the famous beachfront’s ‘Golden Mile’ in Durban. With conference and hotel rooms offering magnificent views over the Indian Ocean, the venue promises to provide as much ‘food for the soul’ as the varied and interesting programme.

Conference theme and programme
A great deal of planning, thought and effort on the part of the Scientific Committee has been put into creating a programme that will be provocative, stimulating and create opportunities for both reflection and forward thinking. After a day of workshops on Wednesday 18 June, each of the following three days of the conference will focus on one aspect of the theme, being:

• Revolution: Calling for fundamental transformation of the existing status quo to ensure palliative care is viewed as an obligation of the healthcare system, equal in value to preventative, curative and rehabilitative care.
• Evolution: Celebrating palliative care models evolving to better serve the needs of a diverse South African population, encompassing communities of every age, culture, belief system and socioeconomic status.
• Solution: Illuminating innovative problem solving within programmes addressing barriers to the provision of quality palliative care for all.