Events

Supporting Those at Risk (STAR) clinic offers support to young mothers and women with complex social and health issues, this may include drug and alcohol use, victims of domestic violence, have mental health issues or are in contact with the Department of Child Protection. The STAR Antenatal Clinic has an average of 7.5 visits/women, and increase in birth weight and decrease in length of stay.

Maternity service are often the key for Regional Services in attracting and retaining skilled staff – if a maternity unit closes, the doctors, the midwives, the nurses may all leave, which has a flow on effect to the broader community. Kasey Sullivan (MUM) will explain the challenging process of establishing and sustaining a new Maternity model of care, ensuring GP and Midwifery support, engaging a AMIC Practitioner and community engagement.

Children’s Health Queensland (CHQ) has delivered inspirational leadership across Queensland when it comes to environmental sustainability. Get an insight into how they fostered positive staff culture change and championed sustainable and socially responsible reform over our procurement, transport, waste, and food systems.

Join Dr Tessa Boyd, founding CEO of Health Justice Australia to explore the way health, legal assistance and other services are collaborating through health justice partnership, to support holistic responses to these complex needs in people’s lives. Health justice partnership is an approach that helps health and legal assistance services to better identify and address complex needs in the lives of women and children.

Clinicians think scientifically every day. Join Dr Zoe Bradfield, Senior Midwifery Research Fellow, Curtin University and King Edward Memorial Hospital WA in this discussion, as she highlights the natural links between clinical care and research to show how and why research is increasingly being led by clinician scientists.

Pregnancy is a time of enormous body transformation. For those with an eating disorder during pregnancy this time of transformation can be distressing and damaging to both the mother and the child, increasing the risk of having a stillbirth, underweight baby or pre-term birth. The management  requires a multidisciplinary team approach with expertise across mental health, specialist medical care, and dietetics at a minimum. Join Prof Megan Galbally and Dr Sarah Fogarty who will discuss their research and share lived-experience insights.

The NSW Cervical Screening Program will be providing a presentation on the importance of cervical screening during pregnancy. The presentation will refer to the Clinical Guidelines regarding cervical screening during pregnancy and cover the critical role midwives play in opportunistically providing and promoting screening to their patients. Additional information on the change to the self-collection policy occurring on 1 July 2022.

At The University of Iowa Stead Family Children's Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, the survival rates for babies born at 22 to 25 weeks are “significantly higher” than the survival rates seen nationally (USA), ranging from 59 percent at 22 weeks to 89 percent at 25 weeks. Survival at 22-23 weeks gestation age is extremely difficult, but not impossible and not hopeless. Jonathan Klein the Medical Director Neonatal Intensive Care Unit will provide a unique insight.

Dr Roshan Selvaratnam's research addresses the detection and management of fetal growth restriction at a whole-of-population level, with the intent of improving care and reducing stillbirth. To combat the decreasing specificity of detecting Fetal Growth Restriction (FGR), he created a balance performance measure to inform hospitals of the unintended ‘collateral’ harm of their strategies to improve FGR detection. The National Safer Baby Bundle has embedded the balance measure into their program and evaluation. It is worth noting that this is the first time a balance measure has been used in population stillbirth programs anywhere in the world, providing Australia an…

'I never felt like I belonged'… In this presentation, Dr Laura Biggs will share a grounded theory which aimed to explain how suicidality evolves during pregnancy and the following year. The theory was generated from the stories of 139 Australian women, generously shared with the research team via online anonymous surveys and in-depth interviews.