Terri-Anne Hamer
Project Worker, Care Leavers’ Association
Biography
Terri-Anne Hamer is a Project Worker with the Care Leavers' Association Connected project, a Churchill Fellow (2025), and a care-experienced parent, mentor and advocate. Her work focuses on amplifying the voices of care-experienced people and promoting trauma-informed approaches across services and systems. Through her Churchill Fellowship, Breaking Cycles, Building Futures, she is exploring international approaches to supporting care-experienced parents and strengthening family relationships. Terri-Anne is passionate about ensuring that lived experience is recognised as expertise and included in decisions about health, care and social systems. Alongside her professional roles, she contributes to national conversations about identity, belonging, parenting, lifelong relationships and system change. She is committed to ensuring that the lived experiences of care-experienced people are recognised as expertise and are meaningfully included in decisions about health, care and other services that affect their lives.
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Associate Professor Sarah Yardley
Associate Professor of Palliative Medicine at University College London
Biography
Sarah Yardley is Associate Professor of Palliative Medicine at University College London and a practising palliative care physician. She was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2024. Her work explores how relationship and structures interact in systems to shape experiences of illness and care. Through research, education and clinical practice, she focuses on creating more equitable, humane and relationship-centred services, particularly for people whose voices are often less visible within healthcare. Sarah's recent work spans palliative care, medicines management, complex mental health conditions, creativity, and system redesign using the motif of Rewilding Healthcare, to create a better vision of meaningful partnership, participation and choice to improve care.
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Session
Thursday 11 March
11:35-12:35
Hexagon Room
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Shifting exceptionalism: “Inclusivity is about meaningful choice”
In this session, we invite you to explore how health and care systems create permissions and restrictions, and what this means for equality, diversity and inclusion in palliative care. Parity of esteem describes the principle that everyone is entitled to care of equal quality. Getting care right for those with the least resources and in the most challenging circumstances has the potential to improve care for all of us. This is not only a social justice issue, but also a question of how we use resources, design services and deliver better care. Inclusivity is not simply about inviting people into systems built without them in mind. Inclusivity is about creating meaningful choices over care, participation and voice. Taking the idea of exceptionalism as a starting point, we will consider how certain conditions, identities or populations can come to be regarded as uniquely sensitive, risky or challenging, and how this framing can unintentionally contribute to exclusion. Through examples drawn from research, clinical practice and lived experience, we will explore how creative approaches can help us think differently about these challenges. Creativity has been described as the capacity to imagine, conceive, express or create something that was not there before. This interactive session will create space for discussion about how we meaningfully involve people whose experiences, needs or ways of participating may sit outside dominant expectations. Drawing on research, clinical practice and lived experience, we will explore how systems can better support choice, inclusion and belonging. Together, we will consider practical ways to improve care for the people who reveal the limitations of how our services are currently designed, rather than assuming the problem lies with those who are least well served by them.
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