International Incident Disclosure conference

The UTS Centre for Health Communication will present the first International Incident Disclosure conference on 4–5 October 2012.

Incident disclosure is of critical significance to contemporary health care communication. Research has shown that disclosure may re-establish patients’ and relatives’ trust in the system, support clinical processes being made safer, and prevent organisations and individuals from entering into time-consuming complaints resolution and expensive legal processes. The conference will canvass these and related issues, with national and international speakers presenting their research on progress in policy and practice reform.

Plenary speakers include:

• Professor Thomas Gallagher - Medicine, University of Washington
• Professor David Studdert - Law, University of Melbourne
• Professor Prue Vines - Law, University of New South Wales

In addition to the conference, two optional Masterclass sessions will be held on 6 October 2012.

The first, an interactive workshop with Dr Suzanne Shale, will explore the arena of moral repair where discourses on patient safety intersect with concepts of restorative justice. The workshop will use a combination of filmed patient stories and empirical ethics research to explore the meaning and practices of moral repair from different perspectives. It will ask whether it helps or hinders patient safety to locate disclosure within the language of morality.

The alternative session is being run by Professor Thomas Gallagher, who has been engaged in incident disclosure research since the early 2000s. His work is highly respected in the US and beyond. In this interactive workshop he will discuss the findings from his most recent studies, which straddle the development of an incident disclosure training resource, and the conceptualisation and trailing of models for incident disclosure practice in close collaboration with insurance organisations and legal bodies.

As this event is an international event and we are expecting to draw both an international and domestic audience we have organized a number of accommodation package discounts. A flyer highlighting the accommodation packages will be sent along with a confirmation email when enrolling in the conference.