Federal SRACA Conference Melbourne August 9-11 – Recap from Lee Spencer
I was fortunate to attend the National conference in August held at the centrepiece conference centre in Melbourne.
The venue was amazing and the trade exhibition was spread out over a grand ballroom. There was plenty of trade and some excellent speakers.
Day 1 David Nash presented the launch of the Teressa Normington WFHSS Scholarship that enables members to attend world conferences with $5,000 sponsorship. A great initiative to remember a leader of our industry.
The speakers on day 1 presented some very interesting topics.
Mark Squirrel a motivational speaker spoke about his work for the world health organisation and his travels to the Middle East and North Africa. He had us all on the edge of our seats. I purchased a signed copy of his book and took away from his speech the resilience of the human mind and body.
The second presenter I really enjoyed was Sulisti Holmes a Scottish Malaysian who managed a large hospital in Glasgow Health Service. She was very entertaining and spoke about surgical equipment that was difficult to clean and sterilise. A spinal retractor used on patients could not be effectively clean and the hospital was able to get the manufacturer to redesign the medical device so it could be reprocessed after lengthy negotiations.
During the course of day several other guest speakers provide very interesting topics. Di Jones presented on endoscopy units having to make several changes to comply with AS 4187 and NSQHS Standard 3. The difficulty of size of the units and how it was taking much longer to make the change.
Day 2 provided more really interesting topics.
Professor Michael Toole presented on covid 19 and handling a pandemic. I found his talk the most interesting of the conference .He came out of retirement to help the federal government in 2020. He was so knowledgeable on different types of respiratory diseases and talked about the back ground work being done in Australian laboratories.
I also attended Karen Vickery talk on biofilm which was very interesting as well. She spoke of the bacteria having tougher membranes and chemicals and heat not being able to penetrate the membrane.
Overall the day was very informative and relevant to our industry.
On Thursday evening the WA SRACA committee members attended a dinner at the MCG. We got to network with other delegates from around Australia and New Zealand. It was a very nice evening for all.
Lee Spencer
President SRACA WA
