St Columba's Hospice & Marie Curie: Illness, caring, dying and loss: What can we do?
In this workshop, Roddy Ferguson & Helen MacGregor explores the role that palliative care plays in how we think about death, with the aim of moving us to a right to palliative care in Scotland.
We explored some of the personal experiences and stories of people who, due circumstances such as social isolation or poor housing, could not make the choices they wanted at the end of their life.
We also delved into some of the structural issues that must be addressed, and what can be done an individual, community, and societal level to ensure people are supported to make the right choices for them.
Roddy and Helen also shared information about the campaign for a right to palliative care in Scotland.
Scottish Recovery Network: The Role of Peer Support in Addressing Health Inequalities
In this workshop delivered by Eilidh Hollow from Scottish Recovery Network and supported by her colleague Lisa Moynes, participants explored the role of peer support in addressing health inequalities.
Eilidh introduced peer support as an approach, describing how it brings people together through shared lived experience, creating spaces where relationships are built on mutual understanding, trust, and respect. She emphasised how peer support recognises lived experience as a valuable form of knowledge, helping to shift power, strengthen people’s voices, and support greater choice and control in their lives. Across Scotland, therefore, peer support plays an important role in communities and organisations working to challenge inequality and support recovery.
After this helpful summary, the rest of the workshop time was given over to an exercise designed to enable participants to explore what peer support means in practice and how it contributes to community-led approaches to health and wellbeing. Eilidh asked workshop participants to identify a range of barriers which were then added to a ‘wall of inequality’.Groups were then provided with a set of prompts around what peer support brings, and asked to discuss how these helped to tackle health inequalities.
The session worked really well, and insights that were generated included: the role of peer support in challenging expert/patient relationships; how peer support gives people collective influence in challenging power; and, importantly, how peer support creates a safe environment for people to share their experiences and mutually support one another. Some interesting questions were raised as well, such what implications the different stages people will be at in their recovery journeys has on how peers support works in practice.
The session also created space to connect with others, share learning, and build relationships that support ongoing peer practice. The quality of the conversations generated was evident by hard it was to move everyone on for their lunch.
