Gibin and Bree win a major prize

The National Nursing Forum is the Australian College of Nursing’s signature annual leadership and educational event bringing together nurses, students, and other health professionals from around the country and across the globe. It took place on the 17-19th August 2022 at the Darwin Convention Centre.

This year, two of our nurses, Gibin and Bree attended the forum over the course of three days. They were awarded this prize as a result of their joint win in the Nurse of the Year at our Annual Estia Health Conference in May. This award recognises nurses who delivered outstanding resident care and delivered positive outcomes, performing above the expectations of their role.

In their own words, let’s hear how they found the event:

Gibin

“For me, I have heard about the National Nurses Forum, however this is the first time I have participated. My goals were to connect with nurses and nurse leaders from different sectors, to know how well they are performing and how they manage to do it consistently. Also, to listen and understand the lived experience of great nurse leaders, especially regarding their strategies for leadership, mentoring and work life balance etc. I was also enthusiastic to know about the future of nursing profession as there is a lot of innovation and technology that has kicked into the nursing profession since COVID.

There were some keynote speakers who addressed about aged care however not many. But I can see that emphasis is coming on aged care from the discussions.

I was so excited to attend and couldn’t believe that I was invited. I would like to see Estia Health represented at the conference next year, as we are one of the largest providers of aged care in the country.

The theme of the Nursing conference is Leadership Unmasked. It’s all about leadership. There were a lot of inspirational stories.”

Bree

“I was surprised that I was awarded this prize, and so excited as this was the first time I have ever been to Darwin let alone attended a nursing conference before, so I was not quite sure what to expect. I was so happy and very grateful to of had this opportunity awarded to me.

There were certainly a lot of sessions that I went to over the three days. You had choices of concurrent sessions during the day from Culture Change, Innovation, Quality and Safety and Workforce, around 20mins per session, that you were able to move between, depending on what appealed to your interests. I enjoyed so many of these sessions but there was one session I went to by a speaker named Nicola Taylor who spoke about a Nurse-led ambulatory infusion service for at risk COVID patients. If was amazing to hear how they work throughout a COVID outbreak and lockdown to still provide dialysis to patients during the pandemic in a safe environment for nurses and the patients. It was such an amazing opportunity.

I will be attending future nursing forums as I found it was a great chance to network with fellow nurses which all had such amazing knowledge and different experiences and provided different choices within your nursing career. I would have loved to have met up with more nurses from the aged care sector, as it seems to be a forgotten profession within nursing”.