Arts Symposium

The 7th Annual International Symposium for the Arts in Palliative Care

“Encountering the arts in life, death and grief.”

Friday 20th November 2026

9.30 – 17.00 UK time

Hybrid event (in-person and online)

Organised by St Columba's Hospice Care in collaboration with Queen Margaret University.  Kindly sponsored by Barcelona Publishers.

This international symposium has become an annual landmark event for the arts in palliative care. It brings together arts therapists, socially engaged arts practitioners, community artists, arts and health professionals as well as researchers, policy makers and community partners with a commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration.

This year’s symposium focuses on “Encountering the arts in life, death and grief”. Embracing the diversity that characterises the arts in palliative care (see Tsiris & Lee, 2025), we seek to promote dialogue and exchange across different professional, social and cultural contexts. Through presentations, creative workshops, panel discussions and project examples, we will explore how our creative encounters with the arts can shape our experiences of death, loss and change.

The arts —including music, drama, painting, sculpture, creative writing and film making—can offer a creative space for making sense of our living, dying and grieving.  The arts act as a catalyst and container for expressing and processing intense emotions. They also offer powerful means not only for creating legacies but also for generating safe spaces for open conversations about death and dying in society.

Programme and abstracts

Offering a vibrant and brave space for dialogue among people from different contexts is at the heart of this event.  The Symposium programme features a number of speakers offering local, national and international perspectives. Please see below for the provisional programme with more speakers and information to be announced soon!

Venue

The symposium will be hosted at our beautiful No17 conference venue at St Columba’s Hospice Care in Edinburgh. It will be offered as a hybrid event inviting both in-person and online participants and speakers. Online participants will be able to join via Zoom.

Call for posters

We are delighted to announce an open call for poster submissions for this year’s symposium. Our poster exhibition will be an integral part of sharing practice and research, and of professional networking. As a hybrid event, the symposium will be able to host in-person and/or online poster presentations depending on the presenters’ preference.

To submit your poster abstract, please complete your proposal using this online form and submit it by Sunday 30th August 2026 via email at arts@stcolumbashospice.org.uk

All proposals will be reviewed by the organising team and review outcomes will be communicated by 9th September.

Call for Sponsors

Thanks to the kind support of sponsors and donors, we are able to keep this event at a low cost. If you wish to sponsor the event and/or be an exhibitor, please contact us at arts@stcolumbashospice.org.uk 

Registration

To register, please click on this link. Both online and in-person tickets are available. In-person tickets are limited to 40 and offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Early bird registration closes on 25^th September 2026.

Key timelines & Information

30 August 2026       Poster submission deadline

9 September 2026         Poster review outcomes

25 September 2026       Early bird registration deadline

6 November 2026      Registration deadline (in-person participants)

18 November 2026     Registration deadline (online participants)

20 November 2026        Symposium

For further information about the symposium, please email arts@stcolumbashospice.org.uk

Provisional programme 

To download the abstracts, please click here.  Please note the programme is subject to minor changes.  Poster presentations will be announced in September.