KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Prof. Jane Walsh
Prof. Gertraud (Turu) Stadler
Preliminary Title:
Prof. Alex Gillespie
This keynote explores how psychological theory and evidence are shaping the evolution of digital health, from behavior change and human–technology interaction to trust, ethics, and digital equity. By grounding technological innovation in human insight, psychology transforms data into understanding and design into impact. Spanning areas including user engagement, AI-guided interventions, and adaptive care systems, health psychology provides a catalyst for meaningful transformation in the digital health landscape.
With bigger and better data sets, our capacity to understand heterogeneity in the health sciences has grown. Health psychologists have a crucial role in building a better understanding of heterogeneity in the health sciences: We can contribute with our expertise to classic and AI supported pathways to advancing theory building, assessment, data analysis and personalized interventions addressing heterogeneity in general population samples, patients and providers on the individual and social level. At the same time, many psychologists are acutely aware of the challenges, risks and opportunities of these pathways and can draw on prior good practices for addressing ethical, psychosocial and legal implications in developing and testing personalized interventions to improve health and health care.
Medical errors are a leading cause of death. Despite much effort, there has been little improvement. Incidents are overlooked, staff and patients are reluctant to speak up about safety issues, and when issues are raised responses are sometimes slow, bureaucratic, or even defensive. Using AI to analyze patient complaints and feedback about healthcare treatment reveals that patient-reported incidents are a better predictor of hospital level mortality than staff-reported incidents. The value of patients’ observations about safety is that they are at the sharp end of care, highly invested, consistently present, and outside of the culture of the hospital.
This keynote will present a series of participatory action research projects focused on Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) in Cyprus. Baby Buddy Forward developed a multilingual digital platform for enhancing health literacy during the transition to parenthood by actively engaging stakeholders in priority setting and the collaborative development of audiovisual and other material. Baby Buddy Communicator used social video pedagogy with peer-to-peer feedback to enhance healthcare providers’ communication skills to actively support shared decision-making. RESPECT and RESPECTWatch combined evidence gathering, participatory engagement, and behavior change theory to promote collective reflection on current practices and develop research-informed practical tools and advocacy processes. Together, these projects illustrate how purposeful integration of digital technology, behaviour theory, and participatory research approaches can gather evidence on the quality of care while enhancing health providers’ skills and advocating for system-level change.
Prof. Alex Gillespie
Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science
London School of Economics
Bio: Alex Gillespie is a Professor of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, a Visiting Professor at the Oslo New University, and an Editor of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. His research examines communication problems, especially speaking-up, defensiveness, misunderstandings, distrust, and problems of listening to and learning from challenging feedback. He developed the Healthcare Complaints Analysis Tool.
Dr. Nicos Middleton
Associate Professor, Health Sciences Research Methodology and Biostatistics
Department of Nursing, School of Health Sciences
Cyprus University of Technology