Programme

You will be greeted with food and drink. If you or your organisation would like to be warmly welcomed by the 200 attendees by sponsoring the refreshments get in touch.

Dr Ros Taylor MBE – Medical Director St Giles Hospice, Honorary Consultant Hospice of St Francis, Clinical Associate Hospice UK. An  introduction to the subject matters and terms ‘digital assets’ and ‘digital legacy’. How these subjects relate to end of life care.

Coop H., Marlow C., West Midlands Collaborative Actioning Research in End of life and Supportive care (WM CARES)

Social media is becoming a more prominent part of our everyday lives. As a consequence we will be leaving a digital legacy after death. Digital legacy is the digital information that is available about someone following their death, which may include website or blog listings, social media profiles, photos, videos and gaming profiles. Many will find it a comfort that their legacy remains on social media but there can also be negative consequences in relation to death, dying and bereavement. This survey was carried out to establish whether we prepare patients for their digital legacy within the West Midlands.

An online survey was sent to 11 hospices within the West Midlands, UK, over a 6 week period in 2017. The survey was circulated by the hospices to the doctors, nurses and social workers.

210 responses were collected (35% response rate). 96% had never discussed digital legacy with patients. Reasons for not having such discussions largely related to it not being considered, lack of knowledge about digital legacy or it not being felt to be appropriate or important.

This survey of health and social care professionals shows that we do not discuss digital legacy with patients. There is a potential unmet need that we are not addressing for patients. There is an education need across the region to raise awareness and confidence of digital legacy.

Dr Ollie Minton (Macmillan consultant in palliative medicine Brighton and Sussex University hospitals)

Ollie will share experiences to encourage more sharing of data, opinions and joining a growing palliative multidisciplinary team (MDT) online. He will explore the impact that professionals can have in the media and the opportunities that the internet offers in relation to funding/ advance care planning / organ donation / research updates and blogs.

Case studies will include Mark Taubert’s globally recognised letter to David Bowie. Others will include blogs in the BMJ supportive care (OM) and other sources .

Ollie will question the interactive nature of online and how this can improve aspects ranging from patient satisfaction to promoting the work of a healthcare professional. His theoretical probing will ask “how can online actions be counted and quantified?” and “What value could Public Health England assign to a professionals digital footprint, interactions and engagement”.

Dr Mark Taubert Cardiff – University School of Medicine, Cardiff, United Kingdom, Digital Legacy Association London, United Kingdom

The use of internet enabled devices by patients at the hospital;/hospice bedside appears to be increasing. Digital connections are everywhere, and can bring new opportunities when we are seriously ill. But what makes a good digital death? And how can digital media bring meaning during serious life-limiting illness?

In this talk, Dr Mark Taubert will outline his personal and professional experience with patients, carers, researchers and fellow healthcare professionals working in palliative care, and how since 2013 he has tried to make good use of new media. The taboo around death and dying is seemingly starting to crumble on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter with many more opportunities for us in palliative care to influence debate. How celebrities die, for instance, is increasingly commented on, but Mark will also tell stories from the wards and clinics, where people have asked him questions about what they should do with digital content when faced with the end of their lives.

Mark is a palliative care doctor at Velindre NHS Trust cancer hospital in Cardiff (UK) and a senior lecturer at Cardiff University. He is national strategic lead for advance and future care planning in Wales and holds roles with the Bevan Commission, Byw Nawr and the End of Life Care board in Wales. Mark is a regular speaker and editor in areas relating to palliative care, digital media, resuscitation and end of life care. He also contributed to a BBC Radio 4 programme in the UK called “My Digital Legacy´ in 2017 with the presenter Joan Bakewell .

Mark will illustrate a story of a patient he worked with who created digital legacy content in the form of videos and messages, to be viewed at significant future dates in his family´s life. The journey to achieve this was in many ways harder than achieving good symptom control and took a significant emotional toll, but was what the patient truly wanted. The story was reported on by BBC World in 2019, as part of a report about digital legacy.

Nilay Erdem – Facebook Stakeholder and Engagement Manager EMEA

It’s difficult for Facebook to know what action to take with the account of someone who has died. What should they do with an account of a deceased young woman, for instance, when one of her parents wants to delete the account but the other wants to preserve it as a memorial for friends and family? How do they know what the daughter would have wanted? And what should they do if the family wants to see the private messages between the daughter and her friends – friends who are still alive and don’t want their messages to become public?

These questions — how to weigh survivors’ competing interests, determine the wishes of the deceased, and protect the privacy of third parties – have been some of the toughest we’ve confronted, and we still don’t have all the answers, Facebook says. In this session, Nilay will talk about Facebook’s approach on some of these questions and the products that they developed with the goals of supporting people who are bereaved while honouring the wishes of the deceased.

James Norris (founder of the Digital Legacy Association and the Digital Legacy Conference. Lecturer at University College London)

James’ abstract will examine how the role of the healthcare and social care professional is changing following recent changes in attitudes and behaviours around end of life planning, death and the internet.

He will use year on year data from the digital death survey to further evaluate how professionals are embracing recent technological and communicative developments to better support patients with their digital assets and their digital legacy. It will question how technology is changing the ways in which the general public plan for death and how this relates to both advance care planning and documenting other important areas within a Last Will & Testament. Case studies will lead to a critical analysis around the impact of grieving online and the influence and importance of digital dead.

Digital assets and digital legacy resources currently being used by clinicians and the general public will be reviewed and discussed. Online planning tools that assist patients and the general public to plan for their digital death, and tools that enable the deceased to interact with their loved ones ´into perpetuity´, will evoke ethical, moral and sociological questions.

The session will conclude with the question; “should conversations around someone´s digital wishes form part of a holistic approach to advance care planning or should this area be addressed somewhere else?”

Four speakers (TBA) will be invited on stage for the panel conversation. The theme of the panel discussion will be ‘how to better support patients and families with digital assets and digital legacy’. This is an area that brings up questions surrounding ownership, legalities, safeguarding, the role of palliative, spiritual and and family support. Expect a lively debate, innovation and new ideas.