Dear colleagues
On behalf of the organizing team, I would like to inform you of an Advanced Seminar at the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care entitled “Can Anorexia Nervosa ever be a Terminal Illness?” on Monday 8th May 2017 in St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
It appears to us that there have been major shifts in thinking and practice within the Eating Disorder clinician community since 2012 regarding severe and intractable eating disorders, which have both been mirrored and driven by 5 legal cases in the court of protection (England and Wales), concerning whether patients have capacity, and if they do not, whether they should be allowed to refuse treatment in the knowledge that they would die as a result. This however has largely gone undebated, even though in mental health we have never previously believed that any patients should be allowed to refuse life saving treatment for a mental disorder, even if it is incurable. It is the intention of this seminar to bring together key leaders in the clinical community together with experts in law and ethics to think through the issues involved, in order to constructively and thoughtfully develop a response to these changes.
This Advanced Seminar will be a closed, invitation-only event with a small number of delegates to facilitate in depth exploration and discussion of the theoretical issues. We are inviting experts whom we consider you to have particular expertise and a particular perspective that would be really important and valuable to this inter-disciplinary discussion. We are also organizing a larger conference intended for mental health clinicians and open to all, on 29th September 2017 in Wales. That larger conference will focus on the debate and its implications for practical clinical decisions, which this seminar will inform and feed into.
To maximize the opportunity to hear from every expert in the room, the programme will emphasise discussion and debate, and didactic talks will be limited to only those which can inform the people who come from different disciplines of the current state of the art so that we are all can contribute equally to the discussions.
We apologise but we do not have funding or sponsorship for this event so are unable to pay speakers’ fees nor travel and hotel accommodation. We hope this will not put you off from coming to this event, which we feel is important to the development of thought within psychiatry and the law. The event itself and lunch will be free of charge as these costs are kindly borne by the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care.
There are only very limited spaces remaining. Please let us know if you wish to attend, by emailing Jacinta at . Please provide together with a short description of your discipline and perspective and how you feel you would be able to contribute to these discussions.
Warmest regards
Jacinta, Clementine, Emma and Gerrard (organisers)
Jacinta Tan (eating disorder psychiatrist and medical ethicist, clinical associate professor at Swansea University)
Clementine Maddock (consultant psychiatrist at Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board and Special Advisor on Mental Health and Mental Capacity Law, Royal College of Psychiatrists)
Emma Cave (Professor of Healthcare Law, Durham University) and
Gerrard McCullagh (eating disorder clinical lead, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, and clinical lead for research and audit in Welsh adult ED network)