Sir Ray Avery

Sir Ray Avery is a successful Pharmaceutical Scientist, a founding member of the Auckland University School of Medicine, Department of Clinical Pharmacology and former Technical Director of Douglas Pharmaceuticals who, over the past thirty years, has made a major contribution in the development of New Zealand’s Pharmaceutical industry.

After spending his childhood in English orphanages and foster homes, Ray developed an interest in science at the age of 14 while living rough on the streets of London and finding warmth and inspiration in public libraries. He went on to become an award winning scientist and successful businessman.

However, it is Ray’s groundbreaking work in the developing world that has brought him respect and recognition internationally.

As Technical Advisor to the Fred Hollows Foundation, Ray designed, and commissioned two state of the art Intraocular Lens Laboratories in Nepal and Eritrea. Today, these Laboratories supply 16% of the world’s market for IOL’s and thanks to the innovative lens manufacturing technology invented by Ray Avery, the global cost of Intraocular lenses has decreased to less than $6.00 making modern cataract surgery available to the poorest of the poor.

Working throughout Africa and Asia and exposed to the raw and real shortcomings in healthcare, Ray was determined to use his knowledge of Pharmaceuticals, Science, Project Management and Product Design to tackle big health issues endemic throughout the developing world at a very practical sustainable level.

In 2003, Ray founded Medicine Mondiale and using his contacts, and charisma he enlists the help of other scientists, and social entrepreneurs to work with him.

Today, an International network of scientists, technologists together with New Zealand companies and Nobel Laureates’ support him and somehow everyone finds themselves donating their time and knowledge for free and they are rewarded by making a difference.

Ray has also invented the Acuset IV Flow Controller which was a finalist in the 2008, Saatchi & Saatchi World Changing Ideas Award, and Proteinforte a revolutionary treatment for Protein Energy Malnutrition and a low cost infant incubator specifically designed for use in the developing world.

His work has been recognised by his peers and he has received numerous awards including a Rotary Paul Harris Medal,The Bayer Research and Development Innovator Award 2008,World Class New Zealand Award for Biotechnology 2009,TBWA Disruption Award 2010,Kiwi Bank New Zealander of the year 2010.The Blake Leadership Medal 2010.

Ray is also the Patron of the Non Resident Nepali Association of New Zealand a position previously held by Sir Edmond Hilary and is the chair of the World Class New Zealand advisory committee.

For further information on the work of Medicine Mondiale visit www.medicinemondiale.org.

Presentation Synopsis

Award winning scientist and humanitarian Sir Ray Avery will examine the history of modern medical interventions and how the development medical products, technologies and clinical services may be improved through Product Realisation strategies rather than Product Development strategies.

Sir Ray will also show how observation is the key precursor to the implementation of “game changing” medical technologies and products.

Delegates will be given practical insights in how to improve their observation skills and improve diagnostic skills and gain a wider understanding of global healthcare trends”

Sir Ray talks are always inspirational and challenge the status quo leaving delegates inspired to use their secular skills to make a difference in improving global healthcare

Professor Janetta Roos

Professor Janetta Roos obtained the BCur (Nursing) degree from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. All her other academic qualifications (BACur, BACur Hons, MACur and DLitt et Phil) were obtained from Unisa. Her thesis was entitled Patient satisfaction with nursing care. She is a registered nurse, midwife, psychiatric and community nurse and is also registered with the South Africa Nursing Council as a nurse educator, administrator and assessor. Before joining Unisa in 1983, Janetta worked as a registered nurse in various hospitals wards and also as a school health nurse and a district nurse.

As associate professor, professor Roos teaches Health Services Management at Unisa at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She acts as external examiner for three universities at undergraduate and postgraduate level and was also external examiner for 29 theses and dissertations of eight South African universities.

Professor Roos has supervised/co-supervised 22 masters and three doctoral graduates and is currently supervising 8 doctoral and 12 master’s students. The main focus of the research relates to women’s health, primary health care and management issues.

She has authored/co-authored 6 chapters in four books, as well as 10 articles in 5 different accredited journals (three South African and two international). Professor Roos is a reviewer for two South African peer-reviewed journals and a board member of the Africa Journal of Nursing and Midwifery. She has presented 6 papers and posters at national and international conferences.

Presentation Synopsis

One of the challenges faced by health care organizations generally, and nursing management in particular, is how to utilize available human resources optimally. This challenge also implies recruiting student nurses to the profession with the necessary interpersonal as well as analytical skills. Today’s healthcare workforce comprises mainly Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), most of them will be retired by the end of this decade, making way for Generation X and Y employees.

Other issues relating to tomorrow’s workforce include:

• advances in research and technology
• school leavers’ wider career choices, possibly impacting negatively on the recruitment of student nurses
• globalization and migration of healthcare professionals and globalization of diseases such as bird and swine flu
• unpredictable world economy
• educational changes at schools and tertiary levels
• quality of patient care, including increased numbers of geriatric patients, more knowledgeable patients, fewer healthcare professionals, spiraling healthcare costs

Nurse leaders and educators should plan for more efficient ways to provide nursing services. Innovative approaches of managing human resources might not be well accepted by staff members unless managers succeed in securing their participation and support. This key address will look at strategies to promote innovations in human resource management and capacity building to establish a workforce with the necessary capabilities to function in diverse circumstances.

Professor Bernie Carter

Bernie is Professor of Children’s Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire and Director of the Children’s Nursing Research Unit (CNRU), Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. She is also Visiting Professor at EdgeHill University and a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing.
Bernie absolutely loves research as it provides loads of challenges and opportunities for problem-solving. She believes research is generally fun, good for the soul and can help improve the experiences and health outcomes of children and their families.

Her research is narrative, appreciative, collaborative, and arts and activity-based in its approach. She is particularly interested in children’s pain, care provision for children with complex health care needs and the role that children’s nurses play in the lives of children, young people and their families.
Since 2008 she has been leading the development of the Children’s Nursing Research Unit (CNRU) which is a unique, ambitious, collaborative and initiative that aims to celebrate and further establish the distinctive contribution of children’s nursing research. It is a partnerhsip between three HEIs and a Foundation Trust. The CNRU is aiming to create a research community comprised of nursing scholars, clinicians, children and their families and to create opportunities for all members to develop their own skills, knowledge and capacity.

She has extensive experience of supporting new researchers and successfully supervising doctoral research students through to completion and mentoring professionals during their early post doctoral careers.

Bernie has published quite extensively (books and articles) and is the Editor for the Journal of Child Health Care, Sage Publications.

In her free time she loves to ‘relax’ by going rock climbing, walking, mountain biking and cycling (although not usually all at the same time): these activities are good antidotes to research!

Presentation Synopsis

Reflecting, refracting, diffusing and shifting: mapping learning opportunities through interconnected communities of practice

Drawing on Wenger’s (1998) notion of ‘communities of practice’ I will examine how this notion of shared learning creates important and unique opportunities for sharing knowledge and developing nursing practice.

Wenger (2000 p229) proposes that communities of practice are the “basic building blocks of a social learning system”, defining competence through the three elements of joint enterprise, mutuality and a shared repertoire of communal resources. Using Wenger as an origin, I will map a range of different communities of practice. I will consider what learning opportunities these seemingly discrete communities offer to their members and how they can relate to each other. When nurses are encouraged and supported to cross boundaries and to engage in less familiar communities, the learning that occurs can be enriching, engaging and potentially may reframe their thinking and their practice.

Drawing on examples from within my own practice as a practitioner, educator and researcher I will share my own atlas of communities, demonstrating how these can act to reflect, refract and diffuse a more insightful understanding of what can constitute nursing practice and our ways of working with people.

References

• Wenger E (1998) Communities of Practice: learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger E (2000) Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems. Organization 7, 225.

Dr Janet Roden
RN, CM, BA (Macq), MA (Macq), PhD (UWS), FCN.

Janet is a registered nurse and midwife who has worked in higher education for 24 years as a nurse educator and a lecturer with expertise in child and family health, health promotion and Grounded Theory. She has also been involved in curriculum development, the accreditation of nursing courses, and has a background in educational theory and practice issues in nursing. She completed her PhD in 2001 on the topic: “The Role of Families in Promoting Health Behaviours in Their Preschool Aged Children.” Janet has had recent experience in teaching in Bachelor of Nursing programs with many Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) students, teaching child & adolescent health, health promotion, behavioural sciences and nursing fundamentals, and has also taught Graduate Entry students from CALD backgrounds. She has taught external (on-line) Masters students who have interests in undertaking nursing development and leadership projects in hospital and community settings.

Leadership has been an interest and commitment for Janet who was a past president of the professional nurses group - Australian Nurse Teachers Society (ANTS). Research has also been an important field for Janet who has undertaken internal University of Western Sydney (UWS) research projects since 1989. Her research interests and publications have extended from childhood immunisation, and paediatric nursing issues to health promotion for paediatric nurses. So far she has undertaken the successful completion of 6 projects, commanding small grants of $4-5,000 on average. In 1989 and 2002 she was chief researcher for 2 projects which have now been completed. More recently Janet has been involved with ANTS colleagues in on-going research to validate the Australian Nurse Teacher Competencies. This research: ‘Reframing the Australian nurse teacher competencies: Do they reflect the ‘REAL’ world of nurse teacher practice?’ has just been published in Nurse Education Today. Another journal article written with a colleague has recently been accepted for publication in The Renal Society for Australasia Journal titled: ‘Research approaches for novice nephrology nurse researchers.’ The research project: ‘Community nurses and health promotion’ has also been completed. Currently Janet is working as a senior lecturer and as an academic support person assisting and facilitating external Clinical Masters students from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Tasmania.

Presentation Synopsis

Research findings associated with community nurses and their health promotion practices showed that rural/remote community nurses in NSW Australia were more likely to perform health promotion in their workplace than urban community nurses. Rural /remote community nurses also felt more confident in performing health promotion. In addition community nurses, especially generalist community nurses, were concerned about their limited health promotion roles due to lack of time, and lack of resources.

A further research finding, which agrees with other researchers, was that community nurses had a limited understanding of health promotion. In addition the research demonstrated that community nurses spent more time on health education of their clients rather than applying the other health promotion concepts associated with the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986).

Coupled with this is the suggestion that nurses are not keeping pace with other allied health professionals in undertaking health promotion, due to their lack of clarity about the broad concept of heath promotion and its confusion with health education (Whitehead, 2009). The challenge then for community nurses is how do they move from their current position to where the Ottawa Charter and others would like to see them. This will be discussed in more depth, along with further research explanations and statistical results.

Ruth Peterson
Ako Aotearoa

Ruth is Regional Manager for the Northern Hub of Ako Aotearoa: The National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence. She is currently working with a number of large educational institutions in the northern region to promote the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as well as conducting the business of the hub.

Prior to joining Ako Aotearoa, Ruth established and was the manager of the Centre for Assessment of Prior Learning at Manukau Institute of Technology, and she has previously held teaching and staff development roles with a variety of public sector institutions. Ruth is a member of the Advisory Group for the Centre for Studies in Multiple Pathways.

Presentation Synopsis

Ako Aotearoa will take the opportunity to review the portfolio of work the organisation has funded in the health sciences education and nursing education in particular, over the past four years. We will look at the preliminary data from our impact evaluation methodology and discuss what we might be looking for as funding priorities for the future.

Taima Campbell (Ngāti Tamatera, Ngāti Maru)
Executive Director of Nursing, Auckland DHB

Taima Campbell RGON, MHSc (Nsg) is the Executive Director of Nursing for Auckland DHB. The Executive role is responsible for developing and implementing healthcare excellence for the Auckland District Health Board  and providing professional leadership for the nursing and midwifery workforce in partnership with the Nurse and Midwifery Leadership. As a registered nurse, she brings experience in child health, Maori health and nursing leadership.

She is Co-Chair for the College of Nurses Aotearoa, a member of Nurse Executives of New Zealand ( NENZ ), a member of the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal , the Chair for Nga Manukura o Apopo - National Maori Nursing and Midwifery Leadership workfroce development programme and a member of the National ABC Smokefree Systems Steering Group.  She is a past member of the Health Workforce Advisory Committee and has implemented a number of workforce development initiatives including the Rangatahi Programme, the ADHB/A+ Trust Scholarship Programme and more recently a  Cadet Work Experience Programme for young people in ADHB.

Presentation Synopsis

'Learning through the experiences of patients and their whanau - our best teachers'

As nurses we talk about being patient; child or whanau-centred and we aspire to provide quality health care. However the data suggests that we have room for improvement.
For the 2009/10 fiscal year, District Health Boards reported that 347 people treated in their hospitals were involved in a serious or sentinal event that was potentially preventable (Health Quality & Safety Commission NZ, 2010). For the period 1 July to 31 December 2010, delays or inadequate treament was the foremost concern in most complaints to the Health & Disability Commissioner (HDC, 2010) followed by poor communication with patients and their family, many of these complaints largely relating to the attitude and manner of health professionals. On top of this we make people wait, we make mistakes and we are reluctant to apologise when we get things wrong.

Don Burwick at the Institute for Health Improvement (IHI) argues that 'in a growing number of instances where truely stunning levels of improvement have been achieved, organisations have asked patients and families to be directly involved in the process (IHI, Seven Leadership Leverage Points for Organisational-level Improvement in Health Care, 2008). As nurses and educators perhaps the most innovative solution for improving the quality of health care in the future is learning from these experiences and letting patients and their whanau be our teachers.

Jo Walton

Jo is currently Professor of Nursing and Head of the Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at University of Victoria in Wellington. Her background encompasses a range of academic and clinical posts. I joined VUW four and a half years ago and over the past two years have found myself required to lead a rapid and quite radical series of changes: a new curriculum and an exciting relocation to premises among them. My research interests are wide, but my primary research interests focus on how nursing can help improve the health outcomes of the vulnerable, the disabled and the chronically ill; and on simulation in health professional education. My husband and I recently downsized to a little cottage in Newtown, and spend much of our spare time with our large extended family.

Presentation Synopsis

Presentation, persuasion and politics: the art, craft, science and magic of influence

What influence does nursing have on health policy? Reflecting on my own experience and on ideas from the literature I think aloud about policy, power and influence in the health sector and in tertiary (nursing) education. How do education and policy influence each other? As a discipline is nursing powerful or powerless? Thinking ahead, I imagine future possibilities, proffer some suggestions for increasing nursing influence in the policy arena and posit measures of relevance, effectiveness and success.