The Institute for Communication in Health Care hosted our second successful webinar on 23 September as part of the announcement of the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH) with panel members from each of the partner organisations in the IC4CH. The webinar was attended by a total of 203 participants from 33 different countries across the world with a discussion on the impact of COVID-19 on communication in health care. Each panel member described their unique insights and research into how the pandemic has influenced the interactions and communication of both healthcare professionals and the general public.

Professor Paul Pickering (Director, ANU RSHA) facilitated the discussion, asking panellists about their research including the impact of COVID-19 on paediatric care, the use of metaphor during the pandemic and the mental and physical burden faced by healthcare workers all over the world.

Panellists in the webinar included:

• Professor Diana Slade, Director, the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care
• Dr Elizabeth A. Rider, Director, Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School Faculty Fellowships in Humanism & Professionalism and Interprofessional Leadership, Division of General Pediatrics, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
• Professor Elena Semino, Linguistics and English Language Professor, Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University
• Associate Professor Zsófia Demjén, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London
• Professor May O. Lwin, Chair, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information, Joint Professor, LKC School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Dr Olya Zayts, Associate Professor, School of English, Faculty of Arts; Director of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH), Hong Kong University
• Dr Stuart Ekberg, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology & Counselling, Queensland University of Technology
• Professor KK Luke, Director of the Communication in Healthcare group@NTU; Chair, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

We’d like to thank each of the panellists for their contribution, and the attendees for their enthusiastic participation and engagement with the webinar.

For more information, you can:

• watch a video about the IC4CH here
• read more about the IC4CH here
• find out more about IC4CH partner organisations' research here
• watch the recording of the webinar here
• sign up for more information about the IC4CH and upcoming events here