Adj. Prof. Alanna Geary, Acting Executive Director

Dylan Flaws

CKW continues to grow a strong research culture. That’s why I’m so proud to showcase the program for today’s CKW Research Symposium.

The event starts at 9am (Tuesday 17 October).

It will feature research and quality improvement presentations and posters from the current and previous year.

One of the many highlights will be a keynote by A/Professor Dylan Flaws titled My journey as a clinician scientist.

Associate Professor Dylan Flaws is a psychiatrist who completed an MSc in Psychology during medical school exploring how clinicians measure risk and communicate risk.

Later, he started a PhD exploring the clinical problem of chest pain presentations to emergency departments. He is now focusing his postdoctoral research interests on the physical, cognitive and psychological recovery journey of patients who survive severe illness or injury.

The program also showcases research from a diverse range of clinicians, with medical officers, allied health, and nursing professions all well-represented.

Today will be the third time that the CKW Research Development Unit has hosted this popular annual event, which is proudly sponsored by The Common Good.

I encourage you to attend all or part of the event in person at the Caboolture Hospital Lecture Theatre or join via Teams.

International Infection Prevention Week

Welcome to International Infection Prevention Week (16-21 October). The theme for this year is ‘Celebrating the Fundamentals of Infection Prevention’.

Let’s think about what we, as healthcare workers, can do to reduce the risk of our patients acquiring a preventable infection while they are in our care?

What can we do to ensure we as healthcare workers are also protected from preventable infectious diseases?

We follow standard precautions, which is our minimum strategies that are implemented to protect patients and ourselves.

• We are vaccinated for vaccine preventable diseases. Caboolture Hospital provides a staff vaccination clinic on Tuesday afternoons from 2pm -3.45pm. No appointment is necessary.

• We provide a clean safe environment for our patients.

• If there is the potential for contact with blood or body fluids, staff put on personal protective equipment (PPE). This ensures that our skin, eyes and mouth are protected from exposure to blood or body fluids if there is a risk of a splash.

• We remind our patients to observe respiratory etiquette. If they are coughing or sneezing, then provide them with tissues and a waste bag to discard their used tissues, encouraging them to cover the cough or sneeze to reduce the spread of infectious droplets. Remind them to clean their hands after they have used and discarded their tissues.

• Practice safe sharps management. If you administer an injection or use a suture to close a wound, you have a responsibility to ensure that the used sharps is placed safely into a sharps container.

If you see the infection control team member this week, please say hello and wish them a happy Infection Prevention Week!

Stay safe,

Alanna.