APHC27OPCC: Asia Pacific Hospice & Oceanic Palliative Care Conference 2027

Speakers

The conference's keynote and invited speakers bring perspectives from across the region and beyond. More speakers are being confirmed and added as the program develops. Dr Poh Heng Chong Dually trained in adult and paediatric palliative medicine, Dr Chong is Medical Director of HCA Hospice, the largest home and day palliative care agency in Singapore. After a decade running his own Family Medicine practice, he retrained in palliative medicine, completing further subspecialty training in the UK and US. He founded Star PALS (Paediatric Advanced Life Support), the only community paediatric palliative care programme supporting children with serious illness and their families at home in Singapore. His contributions include conceptualising a national framework for compassionate discharges of dying patients from hospital to home, and he was the 2021 Leaders of Good (adult category) winner at Singapore's President's National Volunteerism and Philanthropy Award. He is Vice-Chair of the Singapore Hospice Council and chairs APHN's Paediatric Palliative Care Special Interest Group. Dr Chong will also MC the conference. Dr Billy Rosa Dr Rosa is an Assistant Attending Behavioral Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). He holds a PhD and Master of Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed MSK's Hospice & Palliative Medicine Interdisciplinary Clinical Fellowship. His research teams have secured more than $12 million USD in federal and philanthropic funding to advance palliative care science. He has edited five books and contributed more than 350 academic publications, and currently co-chairs The Lancet Respiratory Medicine Commission on Palliative Care Integration in Serious Respiratory Illness. He is a 2026 Presidential Leadership Scholar, a Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Scholar. In 2024 he was named a Visionary in Hospice & Palliative Care by the American Academy of Hospice & Palliative Medicine. Conference MCs Dr Poh Heng Chong (see above) and Dr Rachel Coghlan will MC APHC27OPCC. Dr Rachel Coghlan Dr Coghlan is a practitioner and researcher working across palliative care, rehabilitation, humanitarian response and global health, bringing public health and human rights advocacy to her work with a focus on making care systems more compassionate, inclusive, just and useful. A Fulbright Scholar, her PhD explored palliative care in the Gaza Strip, and she is currently supporting palliative care responses in Ukraine, Syria and Lebanon. She combines clinical practice with qualitative research and community co-design to centre real people's stories, and writes and speaks to bring more humanity and compassion to conversations about living, dying and grieving -- her work has appeared in The Guardian, the ABC, Crikey, Women's Agenda, MJA Insight Plus and Arena Magazine. She is a researcher at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, and a physiotherapist at Calvary Health Care Bethlehem, and serves as a Board member of Palliative Care Australia and a Council Member of the Asia Pacific Hospice Palliative Care Network. She lives with her family on Dja Dja Wurrung country, where she writes in the belfry of an old church among the occasional bush microbat.