ΠΡΟΣΚΕΚΛΗΜΕΝΟΙ ΟΜΙΛΗΤΕΣ

Compassionate Communities – because support at the end of life is everyone’s responsibility

Allan Kellehear is Professor in Health & Social Care at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. He has worked as a full professor in Australia, Japan, the UK, and the USA. He is widely recognized as founder and one of the leading advocates of the international public health movement in palliative care, also known as the ‘compassionate community’ or the ‘health promoting palliative care’ approach. With Julian Abel, he is co-editor of the recently published Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care (2022) and Wellbeing at the End-of-Life (2025), and a contributing author to the Lancet Commission Report on the Value of Death (2022). A medical and public health sociologist, He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and is an honorary professor in theology and religion at Durham University and in family medicine at McMaster University Medical School in Canada. He serves as patron to the national doula associations in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

Living with Illness and Loss: What Children Can Teach Us

Barbara Sourkes PhD, a child psychologist, is currently Professor Emerita of Pediatrics at Stanford University. She was the founding Director of the Palliative Care Program at Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford (2001-2023). In that role, she established and led an interdisciplinary team dedicated to providing optimal care for children living with serious illness and their families, as well as education and support for clinicians and trainees. Throughout her career, in Canada and the United States, her focus has been on the psychological impact of life-threatening illness and bereavement – and the unique contribution of psychotherapy in comprehensive care. She has always incorporated the arts into her work. She has authored three books and is the co-editor, with Drs. Joanne Wolfe and Pamela Hinds, of Interdisciplinary Pediatric Palliative Care. The American Psychosocial Oncology Society chose Dr Sourkes for their Outstanding Clinical Care award in 2011. In 2014, the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine awarded her their Humanities Award and in 2024 named her as a Visionary in Pediatric Palliative Care.

Prolonged Grief Disorder: History of a Νovel Concept and Directions for Future Research and Care

Prof. Dr. Paul A. Boelen is full professor at the Department of Clinical Psychology at Utrecht University. He also works as a psychotherapist at ARQ Centrum’45 and as a researcher at ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre. Paul is licensed supervisor and cognitive behavioral therapist with the Dutch Association for Cognitive and
Behavioural Therapy. He has been conducting bereavement research and care, for over 20 years. He developed and studied a cognitive behavioral therapy for complicated grief (now referred to as prolonged grief disorder; PGD) in adults, as well as a similar treatment for children who struggle to cope with loss. More recently, he has been involved in the development and evaluation of online interventions for PGD tailored to specific target groups, including people who lost loved ones in traffic accidents. He has (co-)authored more than 250 publications in the field of grief and psychotraumatology.