When you arrive, please make your way to the registration desk to collect your badge. Our team will be on hand to help you get checked in quickly and smoothly. Once you’re all set, feel free to take a moment to settle in, meet fellow delegates, and get ready for a great day ahead.

Exhibition set-up, registration teas and coffee are served

Thursday Posters will be available to view in Pier Eight Room

Take a moment to explore our exhibition space and poster displays. It’s a great opportunity to discover new ideas and be inspired by innovation across our community. We encourage you to browse, engage, and enjoy everything on show throughout the day.

Join Dr Gurpreet Gupta as she officially welcomes delegates to PCC 2027, setting the scene for two days of learning, discussion and collaboration under the theme Science and Spirit: Living and Dying in Modern Times.

Session outline coming soon...

If you are receiving an abstract prize today, please take a seat in the front row so that we can invite you up easily to collect your certificate during the awards presentation. Thank you, and congratulations in advance!

Antibiotics remain commonly prescribed in palliative care, for distressing symptoms or to attempt treatment of reversible conditions in line with patient treatment goals. For patients who are frail, dying, experiencing delirium, or who have lost the oral route for other reasons (for example due to bowel obstruction), achieving reliable intravenous access or repeatedly administering intramuscular antibiotics may be burdensome. When oral treatment is not feasible, clinicians may face a difficult choice between hospital-based intravenous treatment, repeated intramuscular injections, or discontinuing antimicrobial treatment. In these patients or situations, subcutaneous (SC) antibiotics may provide an alternative that may be better tolerated and can potentially be administered without hospital-level care (1-2). Subcutaneous antibiotics are absorbed more slowly than intravenous but may provide a longer duration of systemic exposure (3-4). This absorption profile may be suitable for antibiotics where efficacy is primarily related to time above the minimum inhibitory concentration, with some studies demonstrating similar bioavailability to intravenous administration and pharmacokinetic modelling suggesting that therapeutic targets can be achieved (3). However, for antibiotics where efficacy is more dependent on achieving a high peak concentration, slower absorption may make it more difficult to achieve the required pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic target (3). The workshop will begin with a brief overview of the evidence and pharmacological principles underpinning subcutaneous antibiotic use, followed by sharing an audit of local experience. Participants will then work through practical case scenarios, considering when subcutaneous antibiotics may be appropriate, how antibiotic choice and pharmacokinetics influence route selection, and the practicalities of prescribing and administration in hospice and community settings. There will be discussion to share any experiences using SC antibiotics, with their benefits and limitations. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to identify situations where SC antibiotics may be considered, recognise key pharmacokinetic considerations, and discuss practical and patient-centred factors influencing use.

Diabetes is common in people receiving palliative and end-of-life care, but management priorities change substantially as patients approach the end of life. Decisions increasingly focus on comfort, avoiding symptomatic hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia, reducing treatment burden and maintaining dignity, rather than preventing long-term complications. This session will provide an update following revision of the Palliative Care Formulary chapter on Drugs and Diabetes Mellitus, highlighting developments particularly relevant to current clinical practice. A key focus of this session will be the increasing use of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), wearable technology, and insulin pumps. These technologies may reduce the burden of capillary blood glucose monitoring and support safer insulin management, but their role in hospice and end-of-life care is evolving. The session will consider practical indications for CGM, including when it may be helpful in the last months or weeks of life, and when technology may instead represent unnecessary complexity or burden. The update will also highlight type 3c diabetes, which is particularly relevant in patients with pancreatic disease and pancreatic cancer. Its recognition is important because pancreatic damage, insulin deficiency and altered nutritional intake can create significant challenges, including increased risk of hypoglycaemia. Additionally, the session will address the emerging challenge of immune checkpoint inhibitor-associated diabetes. Immunotherapy can cause abrupt autoimmune, insulin-deficient diabetes, which may present with diabetic ketoacidosis. This can occur in older, multimorbid patients with advanced cancer, creating complex decisions about insulin treatment alongside changing goals of care. By combining these developments with practical principles for continuing, simplifying or stopping diabetes treatment, the session will provide clinicians with an updated, patient-centred approach to diabetes management in palliative care.

Take a moment to explore our exhibition space and poster displays. It’s a great opportunity to discover new ideas and be inspired by the innovation across our community. We encourage you to browse, engage, and enjoy everything on show throughout the day.

Session outline coming soon

Presentation of prizes

Session outline coming soon

Take a moment to explore our exhibition space and poster displays. It’s a great opportunity to discover new ideas and be inspired by innovation across our community. We encourage you to browse, engage, and enjoy everything on show throughout the day.

Royal Papworth Hospital is a specialist cardiothoracic hospital and a regional, national and international centre for advanced heart and lung care. Many patients are supported by highly specialised interventions such as left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) and organ transplantation. These treatments can transform what is possible, extending life and offering hope where few options previously existed. YET many of the patients known to Royal Papworth hospital are also living with chronic, progressive and life-limiting illness. Some will die in hospital, but many will be cared for by local community palliative care teams, hospices, primary care and district nursing services. THIS transition can be difficult. Community teams may be asked to support patients with conditions or devices they have rarely, or never, encountered before. They may be uncertain what deterioration will look like, which symptoms to anticipate, what can safely be stopped, and when and how to access specialist advice. Patients and families may also have long-standing, trusting relationships with tertiary teams, making the shift to local end of life care emotionally and practically complex. THIS symposium will explore the palliative care interface between highly specialised cardiothoracic medicine and community care. Using three patient vignettes, we will consider dying with advanced bronchiectasis, dying with chronic lung allograft dysfunction after transplantation, and dying at home with an LVAD in place. THE session will ask how specialist centres can act not only as providers of advanced treatment, but also as continuing resources for patients, families and local teams when treatment is no longer able to change the outcome. The aim is not to turn community teams into cardiothoracic specialists. It is to share a transferable model of partnership between tertiary and community palliative care, so that patients with rare or technologically complex conditions can receive excellent end of life care wherever they are.

This session will be limited to 60 participants. Delivered jointly by clinicians, educationalists, technologists and a lived-experience contributor, the workshop combines evidence, practice and personal experience. A short presentation will introduce the educational need, co-design process and emerging evaluation data, followed by hands-on VR experience using approximately 30 headsets. Facilitated table discussion and plenary feedback will explore pedagogic value, emotional safety, spiritual and relational care within simulation, and equitable dissemination across the future health and care workforce.