Your Chance to win!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

You could be at the movies courtesy of the Nurses & Midwives e-Cohort Study.....Alternatively, you could collect a $100 voucher to spend on Medical or Nursing books. Just log in and complete survey 2 now to go into the monthly draw for either 2 Gold Class Cinema tickets (Australian residents only) or $100 gift voucher from the University of Queensland's Herston Medical Bookshop which can be redeemed online.

January Winner: Kay Blanch, Cunnamulla, Queensland

Photo source

Kay is currently in a temporary position as Director of Nursing at Waroona MultiPurpose Centre in Charleville. It is a 45 bed facility which is staffed by 49 nursing staff. The residents are Low and High care, Ageing in Place; with extra services for intellectually impaired people. Although Kay works in Charleville, she lives 200 kilometres away in Cunamulla. In true Aussie outback style, Kay commutes this distance twice weekly between home and work!!

Kay has also worked as a Nurse Educator and says “Having nursed for 33 years, I enjoy all aspects of nursing but am especially passionate about lifelong learning" By coincidence Kay's youngest daughter has commenced her Bachelor of Nursing at UQ this year.

Kay says that working and living in the west is a wonderful lifestyle, so if you are interested, send an email to Lindy and she will gladly forward this to Kay. Check out this website to learn more about life in Cunnamulla

What is happening on the e-cohort studies?

Graduate e-cohort Study

The big news is that we are adding a new study to our suite of electronic studies. The Graduate e-cohort study will be launched very soon. Like the Nurses & Midwives and Doctors' studies, the Graduate e-cohort, is a longitudinal population-based study.

The Graduate e-cohort Study is a collaborative undertaking between universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand to investigate factors affecting the recruitment and retention of their graduate nurse and midwifery workforces. Run over a five year period, the study aims to investigate the choices graduate nurses and midwives make in relation to the locations in which they work, the hours they work, the specialties they are attracted to and their on-going education needs.

Participants will be emailed an electronic survey annually for five years. The results from the surveys will then be analysed and used to help governments, universities and health care authorities to develop and plan effective strategies to attract and retain graduate nurses and midwives within the healthcare workforces of Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Graduates interested in participate can register via the study website Susan Kellett also welcomes enquiries from potential participants at susan@grad.e-cohort.net See Susan's profile below.

Nurses & Midwives e-cohort Study

As you would know, we closed the baseline study last year and we are continuing to clean the data. A number of studies have commenced and as a result we can report on some new publications Watch this space for more news.

While the baseline study is closed, the second shorter survey is there for participants to complete. Please complete it as soon as you can and you will be in the running for the monthly prize.

Staff Profile: Introducing Susan Kellett

After graduating form Ballarat Base Hospital in 1985, Susan Kellett spent a year at Repatriation General Hospital Heidelberg (Melbourne). Shortly after she was commissioned into the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps. After postings to Brisbane and Wagga Wagga, she returned to civilian nursing working predominately in high-acuity surgery before finding her true passion in Recovery nursing in theatre.

Susan completed Honours at the University of Newcastle and then completed a Grad Diploma of Perioperative Nursing majoring in anaesthetic and post-anaesthetic care. She commissioned the Recovery Room of the newly opened Holy Spirit Northside Hospital in Chermside in 2001 which she managed until she established the perianaesthesia education role in 2005.

Susan has also worked at Deakin, ACU, the University of Newcastle and UQ in teaching roles on undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She is currently a research fellow at UQ and manages the Graduate e-cohort study. Her research interests include graduate nurses and nursing history. When Susan isn't working as a research fellow at UQ, she likes to climb 1000 year-old Irish Round Towers (see photo above). Susan also has a keen interest in travel and archaeology (which she is going to study when she retires one day!).

News from the professions: A novel approach to an old problem

"The Health Contact Centre provides 24 hour, confidential telephone assessment and information services..."

As professional care-givers, we are all aware of the constant demands on our time and resources when it comes to delivering high quality care. In order to use expert nurses more efficiently and still provide that quality care, The Queensland Health Department in Brisbane has implemented a "Health Contact Centre". A QHealth source reports that "The Health Contact Centre provides 24 hour, confidential telephone assessment and information services which promote better health through the delivery of evidence-based practice. The mission is to educate and empower people to make informed choices about their health and health care"

The HCC suite of services includes:

• 13 HEALTH: Teletriage, Child Health, Telephone-Based Self-Management (TBSM)
• 13 QUIT
• Intentional contamination of food and emergency response lines

13 HEALTH triage services are provided by Registered Nurses and Midiwives using a clinical decision support system which uses evidenced-based clinical protocols to assist the nurses in determining the appropriate recommendation of care.

During November 2008, over 16,000 calls were made to 13 HEALTH. As such this service demonstrates just one of many major contributions that nurses and midwives are making to the primary health care of Queenslanders. For more information, visit the website

Protecting your privacy on the e-cohort study

As we are stationed at the University of Queensland, all our research activities are governed by strict ethical guidelines. The Nurses & Midwives e-cohort study has been granted clearance by the University’s Behavioural and Social Science Ethics Review Committee.

Ethical governance pertains to issues such as confidentiality, consent, privacy, data handling and storage. None of your confidential information is disclosed to others. Even when the data is analysed or passed from one analyst to another, it is de-identified first.

Nonetheless, we do acknowledge that there are always risks associated with electronic data storage (just as there are with traditional methods) and accordingly we have secured our website with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which is an encrypted protocol for transmitting private documents via the internet.

Should you have any questions or concerns, you are invited to contact The University of Queensland’s Ethics Officer, Mr Michael Tse