Art, Death, Jazz and Zombies coming to dotMD 2019

Where can you find art, death, jazz and zombies mixing in apparent harmony? Only at DotMD 2019!

We are absolutely delighted to announce the dotMD line-up for 2019. The conference that has brought you Samuel Shem, Panti Bliss and ZDoggMD (just some of many highlights) is back with a double helping. In response to demand, we have made it a 2 day festival of curiosity for doctors and healthcare practitioners looking for more from medicine, and we’ve moved to Galway for this year’s event on September 13th and 14th.

During our successful run of annual one day festivals at Smock Alley, we set out to reawaken a sense of curiosity about medicine that some may have lost along the way – and help them find deeper meaning and satisfaction in their working lives. We’re pretty confident we can repeat this as a two- day event, part sponsored by Abbvie, in the Bailey Allen Hall at NUI Galway.

How would we sum up this year’s event? A mixture of art, jazz, death and zombies gives you a good flavour of what to expect. We have some big names from the international world of arts, the humanities and medical technology, along with the usual mix of music to moisten your palate and soothe your mind.

Multi-award winning novelist Colum McCann, Canadian emergency medicine physician, broadcaster and author Brian Goldman and arts and medicine aficionado, Alexa Miller will be with us. So too will British psychologist Caroline Elton who has questions to ask us about patient-centredness always being a “good thing”.

Good death guru Kathryn Mannix also joins us, with plans to take us on a journey of discovery . “I’d like us to get re-acquainted with the predictable, familiar process of dying; to work out how we can describe dying to patients in a way that offers comfort and hope; and how we can de-medicalise dying, and give it back to everyone”, she says.

Colum McCann wants us to ponder the question “We like to think that we’re listening to one another, but are we really?”. He says he will explore what has happened to the art of listening and how might this apply to the world of medicine.

Brian Goldman’s TED talk – Doctors Make Mistakes. Can We Talk About That? – has been viewed more than 3 millions times. He will be sharing his thoughts on empathy in healthcare with us- the subject of his most recent book.

The Zombie invasion of healthcare will be discussed by psychiatrist and author of the The Zombie Autopsies, Dr. Steve Schlozman, and we are delighted to welcome Dr. Bryan Vartabedian founder of 33Charts.com will suggest how doctors can remain human in an age of digital medicine.

Want to be inoculated against cynicism, isolation, burnout, and boredom? Then join us in Galway for the most original medical conference you will ever experience…

Registration for dotMD 2019 opens at 6pm on Monday 28th January on www.dotMD.ie where you can also register for updates about the meeting. Previous meetings have sold out within hours so register early!

Follow us on Twitter @dotmdconf if that’s your kind of thing.

Dr. Ronan Kavanagh

Dr. Muiris Houston

Dr Alan Coss

The dotMD Team