Plenaries

Unparalysed: How a spinal cord injury and depression shaped a doctor's thinking

Dr Diniesh Palipana

Plato said, "The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul although the two cannot be separated. Yet, we have veered towards physically objectifying the patient experience, leaving the soul behind.

However, in an age where healthcare is in a crisis, where artificial intelligence is deemed more empathetic than a human, rethinking the way we deliver healthcare is critical.

Not only will this improve outcomes and reduce costs, but restore the honoured relationship between the doctor and patient. These are the lessons learned by a doctor who has been through a spinal cord injury and the depths of depression.

Find out more about Dr Dinesh Palipana

Educating for Empathy: An Evidence-Based Approach

Professor Jeremy Howick

Educating for Empathy: An Evidence-Based Approach outlines a rigorous yet practical framework for embedding empathy as a core professional competency in healthcare education. Drawing on the Empathy-Based Healthcare Education handbook, the talk challenges the assumption that empathy is either innate or best left to informal role-modelling. Instead, it presents empathy as a teachable, measurable, and evidence-based skill that is central to high-quality, person-centred, and evidence-based care.

The approach is grounded in six guiding principles: curricula should be evidence-based; informed by patients and students; extend beyond observable behaviours to professional identity (“being”); be evaluated through peer-reviewed research; actively engage faculty and learners; and meaningfully address diversity. These principles are operationalised through concrete educational strategies, including early and sustained patient contact, co-production with stakeholders, experiential learning (“walk a mile in patients’ shoes”), enhanced wellbeing education, and deliberate cultivation of an empathic hidden curriculum.

By integrating systematic reviews, local needs assessments, and robust evaluation, this model avoids both tokenistic empathy training and well-intentioned but sometimes ineffective interventions. The talk will be of interest to educators, curriculum leaders, and researchers seeking scalable, academically credible methods to foster empathy while supporting learner wellbeing and improving patient outcomes—using language and strategies that resonate across disciplines without sacrificing methodological rigour.

Find out more about Professor Jeremy Howick

Teaching Empathy in Clinical Settings

Dr Andy Ward

This interactive plenary invites clinical educators to reflect on how empathic healthcare education can be meaningfully integrated into everyday clinical settings. Using evidence and real clinical examples, the lecture will explore what therapeutic empathy is, why it matters for patients and clinicians, and how it can be taught through supervision, feedback and role-modelling with medical students and postgraduate trainees. The emphasis will be on making empathy visible, teachable and sustainable within normal clinical teaching and practice.

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Designing for Empathy: From Admissions to Assessment

Professor Angela Kubacki

In her plenary, Angela will explore how empathy must be designed into medical education from the outset — from admissions to assessment — and will critically examine whether and how we can assess empathy without diminishing its meaning.

Empathy does not appear by accident in clinical training; it is shaped—often silently—by the systems we design before the first lecture begins. This plenary makes the case for structural empathy: embedding compassion, perspective taking and human connection across the educational pipeline, from values based selection and widening participation to longitudinal communication, professionalism and wellbeing curricula.

Drawing on 25 years of practice and leadership in clinical communication and medical admissions, Angela Kubacki will outline design principles that protect empathic practice and professional identity formation, and she will name the tensions that undermine them (hidden curricula, fear based professionalism, and assessment rubrics that reward performance over presence).

Find out more about Professor Angela Kubacki

Beyond Expertise: The Golden Key from Good to Great Compassion - the ultimate differentiator in healthcare leadership

Dr Rabia Imtiaz

In this deeply personal and inspiring keynote, Dr Rabia Imtiaz shares her remarkable journey from an international medical graduate to becoming the first Muslim female Medical Director in an Acute NHS Trust in the United Kingdom. Through lived experiences, she reveals how empathy and compassion, often invisible yet profoundly influential have shaped her leadership, clinical practice, and personal growth.

Blending compelling storytelling with evidence-based insights, Dr Imtiaz challenges conventional notions of excellence in healthcare. She invites the audience to see it not merely as technical expertise, but as an authentic alignment with values and purpose. Compassion, she argues, has been the golden thread enabling her to overcome barriers, build resilience, and lead with integrity in times of uncertainty.

The keynote explores the transformative power of compassion across three dimensions:

• Self: Cultivating inner resilience, overcoming imposter syndrome, and embracing authenticity.
• Others: Building trust, navigating complex interpersonal dynamics, and enabling teams to thrive rather than merely survive.
• Organisations: Leading through chaos, driving systemic change, and improving outcomes.

Dr Imtiaz reframes compassion as more than a human virtue, it is a strategic leadership skill that enhances patient care, strengthens team cohesion, and drives innovation. She concludes with a powerful call to action: to make compassion the universal first language in healthcare.

This keynote is a celebration of purpose, persistence, and the quiet power of compassion.

Find out more about Dr Rabia Imtiaz