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Auspire – Australia Day Council WA invites you to hear how we can all better prepare and support our communities on death, dying, grief and loss, with insight from leading Palliative Care Researcher, 2023 WA Australian of the Year Professor Samar Aoun.

Death and loss is something we all experience in our lives, yet we very rarely talk about it. In the lead-up to Dying to Know Day (8th August), this free online event will look at the holistic approach to end-of-life care that means that every person in every community would know what to do when someone is caring, dying or grieving. Professor Aoun will reveal the leading research and real-life practices that can be adopted by all towns, cities, workplaces, schools and venues, to support everyone within them.

We will also be joined by Jessie Williams, Community Manager at CCNB, which delivers Dying to Know Day every year and supports individuals, organisations and communities to improve dying and grief.

Registration is essential to receive the Zoom link and access the webinar. Please be advised this event may include potentially distressing content and material.

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The Speakers

Professor Samar Aoun
Prof Samar Aoun is Perron Institute Research Chair in Palliative Care at The University of Western Australia. She is an inspirational champion for improved palliative care and greatly respected for her leadership and advocacy for a public health approach to palliative care and grief support, with greater community involvement.  She is known as an innovator and a champion of practice and policy translation.

Professor Aoun’s research contribution has earned her international recognition, helping to improve understanding of palliative care and bereavement care and the opportunities for improvement through the compassionate communities model of care, with closer integration of clinical and community care aspects.

Her particular focus on improving the end-of-life journey for under-served groups such as people with motor neurone disease (MND) and dementia, terminally ill people who live alone, and family carers before and after bereavement, is one of the many ways she is making a difference.

For palliative care to be accessible to everyone and everywhere, Prof Aoun’s vision is to make sure that every person, every family and every community knows what to do when someone is caring, dying or grieving. For this, she advocates for improving death literacy and grief literacy and for normalising having such conversations. Death, dying, grief and loss are everyone’s business and everyone’s responsibility in the community.

In a voluntary capacity, Professor Aoun is co-founder and chair of the South West Compassionate Communities Network in Western Australia, President of MND Australia, President of the MND Association of WA, and a board member of Palliative Care WA. At the international level, she is a member of Public Health Palliative Care International, and the European Association for Palliative Care reference group on public health palliative care.

Among numerous awards, Professor Aoun received the Medal for Excellence from the European Society for Person Centred Healthcare in 2018, the Centenary Medal in 2003 from Australia’s Prime Minister and more recently 2023 WA Australian of the Year.

Jessie Williams
Jessie Williams has held multiple leadership roles to improve dying and grief in Australia since 2015.

Previous key positions held include:

• Board Director, Executive officer, CEO: The Groundswell Project. The Groundswell Project was established in 2010 to enable social and cultural change in death and dying in Australia.
• Co-Chair: End of Life and Pall Care Stakeholder Engagement Working Group, Ministry of Health (NSW)
• Research Centre for Palliative Care, Death and Dying Advisory Group

Jessie, through her own experience of end-of-life care and grief, is passionate about advocating that death can be done differently. She encourages grassroots and organisational leadership to adopt non-clinically driven models of social support and end of life education. She is a TEDx speaker and regularly delivers presentations to workplaces and place-based communities. In her TED talk, she asks ‘Is death the way to bring us back to community’?. She graduated from the University of Sydney in 1999 with an arts degree and holds post graduate qualifications in training and leadership.

She is currently the manager of community programs (which includes The Groundswell Project) at CCNB. Jessie has excellent adaptation and leadership skills and has a warm, natural style with all she works with.