CONFERENCE CHAIRPERSON’S REPORT
Dear Members
ACCYPN Conference 2023
The New Age of Children and Young People’s Healthcare
Hi everyone, welcome to this edition of the College’s Communique. The Board thought we should lead off with the newsletter reviewing the recent ACCYPN Conference, so here it goes….
Well, we finally made it to Darwin!
The Conference was held at the Darwin Hilton from the 14 to 15 September 2023. A huge thanks to all those who were involved in the Conference Committee, many of us had been planning this Conference since 2018. The Committee consisted of Jess Anderson, Lauren Roberts, (our Darwin experts) Mandy El Ali, Elisa Lay, Cathy Marron, Pam O’Nions, Deb Surman, Lynne Thurbon and myself as the Conference Chair. A huge thanks to all the Committee members for their time, ideas and discussions to end up with the content of the 2023 Conference. I also want to thank Martin and his team at Cre8it Events for their work pre and during the Conference. These events take a lot of time and effort to put together, so well done everyone.
Thanks to everyone who attended the Conference and I hope you all enjoyed the program we put together. It was amazing to be able to meet in person. There are many benefits of being face to face reunions with old friends and colleagues and the making of new friends. I hope everyone enjoyed their time in Darwin and managed to do some site-seeing of the various activities and places that the NT has to offer.
The Conference Committee felt that it was important to add some aspects of self-care and wellness to the Conference, considering the stressors of the past couple of years as we often forget to look after ourselves. We were lucky to have Evolve College involved, providing four massage students. They came to the Hilton on Wednesday afternoon and provided free massages to delegates. There were limited spaces, and these were quickly booked up by the delegates, apologies if you missed out. Evolve has multiple campuses around Australia, so if you are interested in being a subject for students to practise on for them to get their certified hours to get their qualification, we will send information regarding this shortly with links to go to so you can be added to their mailing address. You can also go their website – www.evolvecollege.com.au
This Conference had a slightly different format by incorporating the Master Classes into the Conference program. The first event for the Conference was the welcome drinks at Wharf One Food and Wine, located in the Wharf area of Darwin City. It was a great opportunity for old colleagues and friends to reunite and to make new connections with both delegates and speakers, whilst looking over the waterfront area of Darwin City.
Day One – 14 September 2023
The Welcome to Country was provided by The Youth Mill with a vocal performance by Edwin Fejo with details of the group can be found at https://theyouthmill.com.au/
Cheryl MacDonald from the Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer’s Office was the opening Conference speaker. Cheryl set the scene for the conference, outlining the services offered in the NT, but also highlighting the difficulties they face in providing health care to such a large land mass with a small population. A theme of attracting and retaining staff was a significant issue for the NT and this theme was also noted through other sessions during the Conference.
The first Keynote Speaker was Kristi McVee. Kristi was a Detective Senior Constable in the WA Police Force, working as a Child Interviewer. Since her retirement, Kristi established CAPE-AU and has been working in various ways to help prevent child abuse and break the cycle of trauma that victims are often subjected to. Kristi spoke to the group on ‘The Impacts of Online Child Exploitation on Our Kids’.
The second Keynote Speaker was Amanda Harley. Amanda is the Clinical Nurse Consultant for the Paediatric Sepsis Program in Queensland and spoke about the ‘Paediatric Sepsis Guidelines’ that they had developed in Queensland and the international partnerships that this had led to. This presentation was a great way to show how nurses can lead and shape the healthcare delivery and change outcomes in the health of children and young people. Some fantastic work has been undertaken by the Queensland Paediatric Sepsis working group.
The third keynote speaker was Nathan Wilson from Western Sydney University, presenting on ‘Towards Better Healthcare for Children and Young People with Intellectual Disability and/or Autism: Every Nurses’ Business’. Nathan’s work as part of PANDDA (Professional Association of Nurses in Developmental Disability Australia Inc.) has developed a set of online learning resources for nurses to complete to further educated them on ways to work with children and young people with intellectual disabilities and / or autism. They can be found at https://learning.pandda.net/ if you are interested.
The Rapid-Fire sessions were next, with the Poster sessions held over the lunch break. The concurrent session themes were:
- Creative Ways to Care / Models of Care
- Patient Experiences / Consumer Voices
- Acute Clinical Care
- Ethics, Young People, Mental Health, Rural / Remote
- Technology
- Strengthen Workforce
The day ended with a workshop on Australia’s First National Nurse Strategy, which was facilitated by two of the team from the Commonwealth who are developing this strategy in conjunction with the Victorian Government and all other jurisdictions nationally. Lots of discussion were generated from the session and some of themes that came up were:
- Minimal to no content in undergraduate courses about children and young people
- Lack on importance in some workplaces for post graduate education in paediatrics
- Hospitals and universities not working together to prepare undergraduates for their grad year, by giving consistency of placements
- The lack of supported graduate year programs in some areas
- Short term and non-permanent contracts for staff, especially those who are going on or coming back from maternity leave.
- The difficulty in advancing into nurse practitioner positions even once programs are finished
- Difficulty in getting clinical placements for undergraduate students
- Free undergraduate programs a good idea to increase numbers, but will they attract the right students who will stay in the workforce
- Flexibility in working hours and shift patterns
- These are just some of the topics brought up by the group, which consisted of a large variety of participants in different roles and workplaces, so would hopefully be representative of the nursing workforce working with children and young people.
The evening was free so everyone could do their own activities with many of us heading to the Mindil Beach Markets to sample great food, tourist shopping and sitting on the beach while watching the amazing sunset over the water.
Day Two – 15 September 2023
The day began with Amanda Harley presenting her second keynote presentation on ‘Paediatric Sepsis Recognition and Red Flags’. Another content filled presentation with lots of tips for the audience to think about and use when assessing patients for potential sepsis with the key message of treating for sepsis until you proved it’s not sepsis which has had significant effect on the outcomes of children and young people that do have sepsis.
This led us into the next presentation by Cathy Doidge, who works in the Public Health Division for NT Health and is currently working as the Clinical Nurse Manager of the NT Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) Program. Cathy’s presentation, ‘Preventing Broken Hearts’, set the scene regarding Group A Strep and the devastating effect it can have, particularly with the Indigenous population, causing Rheumatic Heart Disease. We then had a Panel session facilitated by Desley Williams who works with Cathy as the CNS of the NT RHD Program, and she introduced the panel consisting of Laura Francies who works for the Paediatric Active Enhanced Disease Surveillance Network. Gladys Ngugi is the Paediatric Cardiology Coordinator, who sees children and young people in the NT under Cardiology. Michael Spry is the Principal Policy Officer with NT Health and spoke about RHD from an environmental health perspective. Michael has recently been working on an Indigenous Environmental Health Worker Program under the pilot of Rheumatic Fever Funding scheme. All of the Panel speakers outlined their roles and the impact that they are having on RHD and the families that they work with. Laura briefly touched on work that is going on into a vaccine for GAS, which is part of an international alliance being led by Australia. RHD is significant issue in Australia particularly in the indigenous community but is also a long-term problem in the refugee population. The long-term health effects is significant with issues around lifelong intramuscular antibiotics treatment and heart and renal impacts. A vaccine would be a huge step in eliminating many long-term health effects for the generations to come.
As part of the Conference, the College held a special General Meeting to review and vote on changes that needed to be made in the Constitution. During this year the College has had the Constitution reviewed by a lawyer and updated to reflect various changes in the Company Laws of Australia. The College also had sought advice from an accountancy firm to ensure we were also meeting the Company Act Laws, which we were, but again, some changes needed to be made in the Constitution to make our bookkeeping more streamlined. I hope everyone had time to read these changes that were proposed. During the meeting, there were no further questions and constitutional changes were agreed to by those members present, unanimously. The new Constitution will be on the College’s website shortly once all the changes are made.
Before morning tea, we had a visit from the Baby Ballet Darwin group. We were very lucky to have 10 ballerinas perform three pieces for us. All of the ballerinas were either 3 or 4 years old and had different costumes for their performances, one of which was a nurse outfit. A huge thanks to Bethan (the teacher) for organising the ballerinas to come and visit us.
The Concurrent sessions for Day 2 had the below themes:
- Health Prevention and Primary Healthcare
- Creative Ways to Care / Models of Care
The Conference closed with an exceptional session from Timmy Duggan. Timmy was the first indigenous player to play in the National Basketball League in Australia and has been awarded an OAM in recognition of his work. Timmy spoke about his charity ‘Hoops for Health’ and how Hoops for Health Heals. Timmy and his colleagues use trauma and culturally informed coaching and training to work with indigenous youth in a variety of settings, from schools to on country and correctional facilities. It was an amazing way to finish the Conference and I think most of us could have listened to Timmy for much longer. We finished with a quick afternoon tea to say goodbye to old and new friends and colleagues and talked of our hopes for the future of the health and wellbeing of children, young people and their families.
The Conference dinner was held at Hanuman Restaurant which provided a final chance to catch up and relax over dinner and drinks.
Trade Exhibitions / Sponsors:
Thank you to all our Sponsors for participating in the Conference:
- Australian Breastfeeding Association
- Australian for the Wellbeing of Children in Healthcare
- ACCYPN
- Edith Cown University
- Monash University
- Nestle Australian LTD
- Sydney Children’s Network
Having Sponsors at the Conference assists in keeping the price of registration as low as possible. If you are aware of any companies that may wish to be a sponsor or have any ideas, please contact the College on info@accypn.org.au.
Thank-you to everyone who submitted Abstracts and presented at the Conference. There were so many Abstracts presented that were nurse led research and projects which was great to see. Remember that the College has a Journal which anyone can submit a paper to, for review and publishing. So, if you want to build on your Abstract and develop it into an article, please consider the journal. Submission details can be found at https://www.accypn.org.au/jcyph-journal/
Click here to view all the Conference photos and below is a snapshot.
Warm regards
Jacquie Burton – BOD, Conference Chairperson
