Lead With Compassion Workshop - April 8 & 9, 2026

Hosted by UC San Diego's Center for Compassionate Communication, Lead With Compassion is a 2-day workshop in San Diego, CA, on April 8 & 9, 2026, that equips health care professionals, medical educators, and teaching artists who work in medical education and health care with tools to enhance their leadership performance, using proven empathy and compassion principles.

Hear the impact of Lead With Compassion directly from medical providers across the nation:

Lead With Compassion is for you if you want to:

• Discover empathic and compassionate principles that can enhance your clinical practice, medical teaching, and leadership performance in health care.
• Ignite stronger, more meaningful relationships with your patients, peers, and self.
• Transform the way you think, see, and act in today’s ever changing health care landscape.

Get to know your Lead With Compassion Workshop instructors:

Evonne Kaplan-Liss, MD, MPH
Director, Center for Compassionate Communication
UC San Diego Center for Compassionate Communication

Dr. Kaplan-Liss is a national leader in communication training in medicine. Before coming to University of California, San Diego (UCSD), she held the first dean-level position in a medical school, TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine with the mission to train Empathetic Scholars®. Dr. Kaplan-Liss came to TCU from the nationally acclaimed Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, where she was the Founding Medical Program Director and trained thousands of physicians and medical students to communicate with empathy and clarity. Her life’s work is dedicated to training healthcare providers, medical students, and researchers to communicate with compassion with their patients, colleagues from other disciplines, the community, the media, funders, benefactors, and policymakers.

Val Lantz-Gefroh, MFA
Director of Communication Education
UC San Diego Center for Compassionate Communication

Val is a professional actor, director, and teacher. She came to UCSD after serving as the Artistic Director of the TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine. For the last decade, she has created unique curricula based on theater practice and other disciplines to help healthcare providers, students and researchers connect and engage more effectively with their audiences.

Gary Buckholz, MD, HMDC, FAAHPM
Lead With Compassion Faculty and Planning Commitee
UC San Diego Center for Compassionate Communication

Dr. Gary Buckholz is a Hospice and Palliative Care physician and Clinical Professor at UCSD. He received his MD from the University of Kansas and completed his Family Medicine residency at Brown University. Gary completed fellowship training in Hospice and Palliative Care at the Institute for Palliative Medicine in San Diego. Dr. Buckholz currently serves as Fellowship Director for UCSD’s Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship. He provides palliative care consultation utilizing a team approach emphasizing effective communication for hospitalized patients.

For any workshop-related queries:
Email Norma Nava at [email protected]

Info: We will focus today on awareness, connection, listening, flexibility, and designing a clear message about complicated information for a lay audience. We will review important research that validates the importance of compassionate communication in medicine for healthcare providers as well as patients and families. Immersive exercises will build strong team engagement, foster expression, make room for vulnerability and lay the foundation for speaking with clarity, compassion, and authenticity. At the end of the day, you will have time to share what you brought you to this conference and your goals moving forward.

Info: The focus today will be on challenging conversations in medicine and include roleplays, group sharing, and vulnerable conversations. The curriculum is scaffolded to provide applications to our foundational tools in observation, listening and connecting - and an opportunity to share and practice the art of medicine in a brave, supportive space. This will be a highly emotional day, with important breaks and reflective writing to process your learning and your hot buttons. There is nothing to prepare for this day’s session.

Host or Publisher Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion