Community Health calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Presenters: International Street Medicine Symposium IX

October 24-26, 2013 Boston, Massachusetts

The International Street Medicine Symposium Committee is pleased to extend an open invitation for presentation proposal submissions. While we are particularly interested in exploring themes related to continuity and coordination of care across the spectrum of homelessness, streets-to-housing interventions, and integration of Street Medicine programming into local hospitals and academic institutions, submissions in any topic area related to the health care of unsheltered homeless populations are welcome. Street Medicine providers and related organizations are encouraged to submit proposals for one of the following three presentation format categories:

A. Lecture (35 min. large-group presentation + 10 min. discussion)

This format is well-suited for the dissemination of new/updated information relating to the field of Street Medicine, review of clinically-pertinent innovations and best practices, and reporting of outcomes data from field research or interventions. Research-oriented submissions may be work-in-progress. Encouraged topic areas include, but are not limited to:

Socio-environmental determinants of health (environmental threats, health care access, housing access, community building, advocacy)

Morbidity, mortality, and vulnerability assessment

Acute disease diagnosis and management

Chronic disease management and quality of care measures

Integrated management of common complicating co-morbidities (mental illness, substance abuse/addiction, and traumatic brain injury)

Comprehensive primary care and outreach models that foster continuity and coordination of care across the spectrum of homelessness (streets, shelter, hospital, respite, housing)

B. Workshop (60 min. interactive, small-group presentation)

This format is well-suited for the sharing of practical knowledge, skills, and personal/professional/organizational enrichment strategies by presenters with particular expertise in any of these or other relevant topic areas:

Creative patient engagement and motivational strategies designed to reduce barriers and enhance care access for the most marginalized individuals, especially those suffering from severe mental illness, personality disorders, addiction, or deep-seeded distrust

Medical education and training approaches related to homelessness, including curriculum development and implementation, educational resource networking, and faculty mentoring of student-led organizations

Initiating and nurturing relationships between service organizations and local hospitals, academic medical centers, and educational institutions

Creating effective inter-agency and inter-disciplinary collaboration with respect to service, advocacy, and consumer involvement

Fundraising approaches, skills, and resources relevant to Street Medicine practices

Maintaining care access and quality during times of financial and/or political constraint

Ethical challenges commonly encountered in providing care to unsheltered homeless populations

Prevention of burn-out among clinicians and service agency staff

C. Poster (scientific poster format with dedicated viewing time)

This format is well-suited for clinical vignettes, highlighting program development/updates, description of service models, or exhibition of medical education approaches to service learning and outreach. Students and student organizations are particularly encouraged to submit in this format category, though non-students are also welcome to submit poster presentation proposals. (Students are not limited to this format category and may submit in a different category if more appropriate). Depending upon scheduling constraints, there may be an opportunity for selected posters to be presented orally as well.

All proposals submitted will be reviewed and judged by a panel that includes members of the Symposium Committee and other invited experts. Reviewers will evaluate proposals for presentation based upon the following three criteria:

1. Specific written learning objectives (active voice preferred)

2. A maximum 500-word abstract describing the presentation content, approach, and intended format (lecture, workshop, or poster). Abstracts will be judged relative to achievement of the following goals:

a) Target Audience – How appropriate is the topic for an audience of clinicians, outreach workers, service agency representatives, and community stakeholders dedicated to improving the health and well-being of unsheltered homeless populations?

b) Innovation – How novel is the information or approach in addressing a problem related to the health care of unsheltered homeless populations?

c) Impact – How potentially beneficial are the findings, interventions, or programs to the care of patients/clients, development of services, training of providers, or sustainability of programs?

d) Applicability – How accessible and generalizable are the findings, interventions, or programs to other practice sites around the world?

e) Knowledge Advancement – How valuable is the information or approach to the growing body of Street Medicine knowledge and clinical expertise? Have data/findings been collected, analyzed, and presented in a rigorous and scholarly way?

f)  Mission Advancement – How substantially does the information or approach promote/advance the values and vision of the Street Medicine Institute and International Street Medicine Symposium?

3. Adherence to submission guidelines:

a) Submissions must include current title, degree(s), and institutional/organizational affiliation and role for all presenters. A brief bio-sketch of presenters is welcome if available. The primary presenter should be listed first, followed by any co-presenters if applicable.

b) Submissions must include contact information for the primary presenter including e-mail, phone, and mailing address.

c) Submissions must be in Word document or PDF format.

d) Submissions must be e-mailed to pperri21@gmail.com.

e) Submissions must be received by 12:00 am EST on May 31, 2013.

For lecture or workshop proposals selected for presentation, the primary presenter will receive a stipend of up to $750.00 (US) to help defray (documented) travel and lodging expenses incurred by that presenter only. For student poster proposals selected for presentation, the primary student presenter will be eligible for a limited number of travel/lodging stipends of up to $600.00 (US). In addition, for each proposal accepted for presentation regardless of format category, the primary presenter and one co-presenter (if applicable) will be exempted from any relevant registration fees. Submitters will be notified of the review committee’s decision on or before June 7, 2013. Questions about the Symposium or proposal submission process can be addressed to the committee chair at pperri21@gmail.com.

Call for Workshop Presentations: Meanings of Madness: Critical and Creative Perspectives

Catherine Mcauley School Of Nursing And Midwifery and School Of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland in association with Critical Voices Network Ireland

13 And 14 November 2013, University College Cork, Ireland

Madness is a word that continues to invite controversy, with some perceiving it to be a derogatory term, others perceiving it as a celebration of human creativity and diversity, whilst others position themselves somewhere in the middle. This year’s conference, now in its 5th year, aims to explore these various positions by focusing on critical perspectives on the meaning of madness as a human experience and on creative responses to such an experience.

The conference offers opportunities to consider:

• Meanings of madness 

• Broadening understandings of expressions of madness

• creative approaches to engaging with and responding to madness 

Call for Oral Presentations/Workshops (45 minutes’ duration): Please submit an abstract (in Word - 250 words max) related to the conference theme and outlining its aims and intentions by 6 September 2013. Please also submit a brief bio (in Word - 150 words max). Please email abstract and bio to l.sapouna@ucc.ie. Inquiries toh.gijbels@ucc.ie or l.sapouna@ucc.ie

The Conference organisers are Harry Gijbels, Catherine McAuley School of Nursing and Midwifery, and Lydia Sapouna, School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.

Call for Papers: The Disability Experience: State of the Arts, Scholarship and Research

October 31st and November 1st, 2013 University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Set aside the dates and submit an abstract! The Students for Disability Advocacy, a newly formed student group at the University of Pittsburgh whose mission is to advocate for students with disabilities, will be holding a conference  October 31st and November 1st, 2013 at the University of Pittsburgh William Pitt Union entitled The Disability Experience:  State of the Arts in Research, Scholarship and the Arts. The purpose of the conference is to highlight the arts, scholarship and research concerning the disability experience.  The conference will focus on panel presentations by students with faculty respondents.  A variety of submissions will be accepted from students with and without disabilities at the University of Pittsburgh and around the country. Panel presentations will draw from a variety of disciplines including: Assistive Technology across disability, Health & Wellness (disparities), Employment, Policy and Law, the Arts, Education, History, Philosophy, and English. A faculty-student round-table discussion is the final event of the conference with discourse concerning relationships between faculty and students with disabilities. Limited scholarships for travel may be available and food will be available free at the conference.

Purpose and objectives of the conference:

The aim of this first ever disability studies conference at the University of Pittsburgh is to bring together a wide spectrum of faculty, students, and other individuals – especially those from the University and its communities – whose interests capture the experience of disability and who wish to advance disability-related fields and further their integration into the curricula and in community life.  The conference will:

Invite students to present their field-specific disability-related work from across the curricula of science, the arts and the humanities to an interdisciplinary audience

Promote discourse across disability-related fields in order to integrate disability studies into the curricula

Provide networking opportunities by encouraging and enabling attendees to establish connections with individuals of varying fields

Create dialogue between students and faculty about issues and experiences students with disabilities have and to identify mechanisms for resolution of problems.

Submissions:

Abstract submissions should be no more than 500 words and up to three keywords for the paper.  Submissions must include 1) your name, contact information and discipline  2)  title of your presentation and 3) the panel (e.g. Assistive Technology, Health & Wellness, Employment, Policy and Law, Education, History, Philosophy, or English and the Arts) in which you would like to be included.  There will be three accepted abstracts for each panel.  Papers will be shared with other panelists in mid-September and power points will be due two weeks before the conference.    The authors will be asked to make a 15 minute presentation with 5 minutes for Q and A. If you want to display art or show a film, provide a description as well as space and other requirements.

Please submit abstracts by July 1st to Jonathan Duvall at sorc+disability@pitt.edu. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by August 15, 2013. Direct any questions or inquiries to Jonathan Duvall at sorc+disability@pitt.edu.  Please feel free to share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in participating.

This conference is supported by University of Pittsburgh, Students for Disability Advocacy and other organizations.

Call for Presentations: 1st Global Conference on Suicide, Self-Harm and Assisted Dying

Monday 4th November 2013 – Wednesday 6th November 2013 Athens, Greece

This conference brings together discussion of research and practice in three complex areas – Suicide, Self-Harm and Assisted Dying.

Over one million people worldwide die from suicide each year. The incidence of completed suicide is very much higher in males than females, for all age groups and in most societies where recording occurs. A notable exception is China where female suicides equal or exceed male rates.

Risk factors highlighted in research into suicide have included poverty, abuse, gender, age, masculinity, sexuality, mental illness, situational trauma, substance misuse, homelessness, unemployment and other adverse life events. Completed suicides leave in their wake a long-lasting trail of guilt, shame and pain.

Self-harm is a direct and deliberate physically damaging form of bodily harm which may or may not be intentionally life-threatening. It is often repetitive in nature and usually socially unacceptable.

Self-harm is a risk factor in subsequent attempted suicide. Patients who deliberately harm themselves have a risk of suicide some 100 times greater than that of the general population. However it may occur as an event or pattern of behaviour with no relation to suicidal intent. The UK is estimated to have one of the highest rates of deliberate self-harm in Europe, at 400 per 100,000 population (Self-poisoning and self-injury in adults, Clinical Medicine, 2002). It is hard, however, to arrive at definitive rates since self-harm is often practised secretly. Like suicide, it carries considerable stigma.

Assisted dying or assisted suicide describes the set of actions by which an individual helps another person voluntarily to bring about his or her own death. This is a separate issue from euthanasia, which is not a topic within the remit of this Call for Papers. Assistance may include the provision of means, such as drugs, or other actions. There is currently intense public debate globally about a person’s right to achieve death in this way, with complex legal, religious, cultural, ethical and practical issues involved. Assisted suicide is legal in several jurisdictions, including Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and some American states.

Societal responses to suicide have ranged right across the spectrum, from encouragement or acceptance to outright criminalisation of the act. Suicide, assisting suicide and attempting suicide have historically been considered crimes in many societies, often because of prevailing religious doctrines, and yet some cultures and sub-cultures have advocated suicide. Currently there are on-line sites that encourage or facilitate it. There is a wide range of counselling and other therapeutic interventions and treatments associated with suicidal and self-harming states of mind, and these therapeutic approaches are also used to help deal with the painful aftermath of a completed suicide. Art and music therapies have been used to help sufferers deal with suicidal states of mind. Suicide and self-destruction have been fertile grounds for literature and art, producing a rich and poignant body of creative work.

In England and Wales, to focus on one jurisdiction only, suicide itself was decriminalised as recently as 1961. Assisting suicide, however, remains a crime. There is pressure to change the law following some test cases, so as to permit assisted dying. This presents modern medicine, law and ethics with particular complexities since it runs counter to several core principles in those bodies of knowledge and practice.

We welcome abstracts on any of the topics of Suicide, Self-Harm or Assisted Dying from the fields of medicine, psychiatry, nursing, social work, counselling, psychotherapy, philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, history, cultural studies, history, law, creative writing, music, art and literature.

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers  and presentations will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts or presentation proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th June 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper, if appropriate, should be submitted by Friday 13th September 2013.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts or presentation proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.
E-mails should be entitled: SSA1 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chair

Diana Medlicott: diana@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher: ssa1@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Call for Papers: Global Health 2013, The Second International Conference on Global Health Challenges

November 17 - 22, 2013 - Lisbon, Portugal

Submission deadline (full paper): June 26, 2013

Recent advances in technology and computational science influenced a large spectrum of branches in approaching population health. Despite significant progresses, many challenges exist, including health informatics, cross-country platforms interoperability, system and laws harmonization, protection of health data, practical solutions, accessibility to health services, and many others. Along with technological progress, personalized medicine, ambient assistance and pervasive health complement patient needs. A combination of classical and information-driven approach is developing now, where diagnosis systems, data protection mechanisms, remote assistance and hospital-processes are converging.

GLOBAL HEALTH 2013 takes a global perspective on population health, from national to cross-country approaches, multiplatform technologies, from drug design to medicine accessibility, everything under mobile, ubiquitous, and personalized characteristics of new age population.

We solicit both academic, research, and industrial contributions. We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.

Industrial presentations are not subject to the format and content constraints of regular submissions. We expect short and long presentations that express industrial position and status.

Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.

All topics and submission formats are open to both research and industry contributions.

FUNDAMENTALS

Foundations in global health informatics

Computational health

Software for health

Independent living technologies

ICT and health

Platform interoperability

Semantic interoperability

Diagnosis systems

Applied health informatics

User interfaces and visualization

TECHNOLOGY

Bio-medical semantics

Bio-medicine

Disease biomarker prediction

Applications of bio-nano technology

Body networks

Mobile healthcare

Ubiquitous healthcare

TRENDS

Clinical epigenetic

Long term health conditions

Ambient assisted

Genetics

Virtual reality in medicine surgery

Clinical trials

Computational and knowledge management on proteomics and genomics

Drug design, disease diagnosis and control

PRACTICE

Nursing

Patient-centered care

Personalized medicine

Pervasive health

Homecare

Pharmaceutical services

ALTERNATIVE

Biomedicine

Natural medicine

Preventive medicine

Chronic diseases following

Home surveillance

CHALLENGES

Security aspects and access control on medical data

Data management in pervasive context

Data quality assurance and provenance

Patient flow models in hospitals

Clinical data analysis

Information visualization of medical data

GLOBAL

eHealth initiatives

Social medicine

Health global accessibility

Epidemic spreading and control

Health Education

Providing health in remote areas

Decision support within healthcare

Ethical aspects in eHealth

Healthcare plans and patient benefits

Synchronization of federal regulations

Availability of medication

Community health services

Call for Papers: 43rd Annual Association of Black Sociologists Conference Social (In)Justice and Health Disparities: A Continuing Saga

August 8-10, 2013 New York, New York

Chronic illness and disease constitute major societal problems in the United States. These problems include, but are not limited to, obesity, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and cancer.  Marginalized populations, and people of color in particular, are disproportionately affected by chronic illness. These populations are also less likely to have access to or receive appropriate and timely care and treatment. These health disparities are socially and economically detrimental to the health of society at large. Given the gravity of growing health disparities it is without question that serious investigation by sociologists, economists, psychologists, health care workers, and scholars and practitioners from other disciplines is needed.

It is within the Black sociology tradition of engaging in applied sociological research that we welcome the submission of papers for the 2013 Association of Black Sociologists conference. We aim to bring together professionals from multiple fields to develop solutions that will impact social policy. We especially welcome submissions focusing on problem solving and social policy initiatives aimed at eliminating health disparities in the United States and beyond.  Papers that examine traditional substantive, theoretical, and methodological topics are also welcomed.  All interested individuals are invited to submit formal papers, fully constituted sessions/panels, open refereed roundtables, and poster sessions.

To be considered, all submissions must be made on the 2013 ABS Conference Submission Form. Forms can be submitted electronically on the conference web site, or can be downloaded, completed, and e-mailed to President-Elect and Program Committee Chair Thomas Calhoun. All presenters, discussants, and session organizers must be current members of ABS and must register for the conference by the early registration deadline of June 30, 2013. The final deadline for paper submissions is July 15, 2013. No paper or session submissions will be accepted after this deadline.

Name and presentation information for individuals not registered for the conference by July 15, 2013 will NOT appear in the final program.