Date: 1 - 2 March 2021
Time: 0900 - 1900 HKT (please refer to the programme provided later for exact details) 
Venue: All presentations are conducted via Zoom

In no other time has effective health communication been as critical as during the ongoing health pandemic of COVID-19. A massive flow of ever-changing information, conflicting views and advice, and uncertainty and anxiety among the world’s populations have challenged many well-established practices of effective health communication. Medical and healthcare professionals face the daily reality of difficult conversations about deceases, death and dying, the need to establish rapport with patients and families in tele-medical consultations, and extreme burnout, among other challenges. Communication with chronically ill patients and those with acute diseases other than COVID-19 has been disrupted due to widespread restrictions on access to medical facilities and services. Medical educators have had to deal with new ways of providing students with practical exposure to real clinical contexts to achieve graduate competencies. Many medical students have been fast-tracked to graduation and had to join the frontline in this unprecedented fight. These are just a sample of the many issues brought to the fore by the pandemic. Meanwhile, other critical issues related to effective health communication that have existed pre-pandemic, have not gone away.

HKU Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH) invites you to join us at the 3rd International E-Symposium on Communication in Health Care (co-organised by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) that will engage with critical issues in health communication pre-, during and post- COVID-19. The two-day event brings together academics and practitioners from across relevant disciplines of health communication, linguistics, social sciences, medical education, and medicine to share their ongoing research and practical insights in a collaborative effort to address the challenges of health communication in the current times, and what lessons could be learnt going forward. 

HKU RIICH is a founding partner of the International Consortium for Communication in Healthcare
(IC4CH); other partners include the Australian National University, Lancaster University, Nanyang Technological University, University College London, and Queensland University of Technology. The consortium has been established with the aim to build a world-class collaboration between communication experts, healthcare professionals and medical educators to translate health communication research to education and practice and to improve patient safety and the quality of healthcare practices around the world. For further details, please visit www.hkuriich.org.

Those who successfully registered will receive an email with Zoom links three days before the event. Please visit www.hkuriich.org for the programme of the event.

Please download the poster here.