TSANZSRS Bursary Report - Nicola Roberts
by Nicola Roberts
I applied for an ARNS bursary to help provide some additional support to attend the TSANZSRS (The Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand) conference in Adelaide in March this year. The bursary covered some of my registration costs for the meeting, to make it worth my while I had submitted 3 abstracts from some of the research I have been involved in over the last year or so. I was very excited to find out that all three were accepted, 2 as posters and one as an oral presentation. The conference was in an amazing setting, overlooking the river Torrens and opposite the Adelaide Oval. The conference was smaller than I expected but still around 1600 participants. Everyone was very friendly and approachable, and it was great to see talks from people whose papers I had read and meet up with old friends. There was a mix of lots of different sessions, including a nursing session and a focus on the impact of high temperatures, climate change, sustainability and air pollution and some amazing presentations from early career researchers.
The posters were up for the whole conference to allow everyone to dip in and out, and the poster sessions were a cheese and wine event, this was a lovely way for everyone to mix with each other. Although one of my posters was nominated for a prize (a top ten poster) unfortunately I didn’t win.
- Does being a nurse reduce likelihood of current smoking: an analysis of nationally representative data to investigate smoking across the UK nursing workforce.
- Does the mMRC Dyspnoea Scale or stage of pulmonary rehabilitation completion impact on preferences for education?
The posters are usually published later in the year but if anyone wants a pdf copy of either poster please get in touch. The oral presentation was a good opportunity to network, this was presented in a smoking cessation session. The project was funded by ARNS and explored the exposure of nurses to second hand smoke while visiting patients at home (will be reporting back at the ARNS conference in May!). It was really interesting to hear the views from those working in a different country and setting and talk about other work that we are undertaking. We are now working on writing up this work for publication, and I’ll share the publication when we get to that stage.
I did try and explore Adelaide and as it was such a long trip I also organised meeting up with respiratory colleagues in Melbourne. We set up a webinar (from Monash university) which was supported by the Australian Lung Association on personalising pulmonary rehabilitation which went really well. I also went and observed pulmonary rehabilitation at the Alfred hospital (thanks to all the team there especially Janet for managing the mountain of paperwork), which was great fun and had a fantastic view!
My final activity was to present some of my work around pulmonary rehabilitation at Victoria University in Melbourne, which Prof Clarice Tang kindly set up and then I had a bit of time to be a tourist before heading back to the UK. I really recommend going to an international conference, especially to link in with researchers and clinicians that you’d like to connect with. It is also worth organising a visit to any local universities and hospitals/clinics to see how things are done.
Nicola
Professor in respiratory healthcare delivery
