We are proud to have supported two nurses to attend Blood 2023, a haematology focused conference in Melbourne: Serafina Levak from St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney who received the Shaun Rosen Scholarship and Kylie Sih from Royal Hobart Hospital who received funding through the Professor Geoffrey Driscoll Nursing Scholarship.

Both nurses had valuable experiences at the conference and felt fortunate to attend with the travel support of Arrow, or as Kylie put it “What an experience! Thank you Arrow”.

Serafina appreciated the opportunities afforded by the conference to network with other health professionals from around Australia and New Zealand, as did Kylie who finds it difficult to network with others from the island state of Hobart, where “these in-person opportunities are few and far and between”. This conference enabled both nurses to meet other professionals in their field and for Kylie in her role as the nursing representative of the Haematology Society of Australia and New Zealand for Tasmania, the opportunity to seek potential speakers for future nursing education events back home.

Learning from other hospitals and discussing how different institutes approach the treatment of various blood disorders, in particular by bone marrow/stem cell transplants, was a key take-away for both nurses. Also of particular interest was hearing how other hospitals are administering the CAR-T therapy,  an emerging form of treatment in which a patient’s own T cells are collected, modified and infused back into the body to treat certain types of leukaemia and lymphoma.

Experiences were also shared in implementing a Patient Reported Outcome Measures, or PROMS for short, a system used to gain honest and valuable feedback from patients about their experience and ultimately improve patient care. Getting an international perspective on this, and hearing from Linda Watson from Canada, provided great insights that both nurses felt they could take back to their own hospitals.

Kylie also had the honour of displaying her poster on the care she and the team provided a patient suffering from severe aplastic anaemia at Royal Hobart Hospital. We love the title of Kylie’s poster: Chasing Grannies.

While the title of her poster is a little tongue in cheek, the topic is certainly not. The “grannies” in the title are not the kind of granny who might make you a warm cup of tea, but refers to granulocytes (a type of white blood cell). This poster presentation was in fact about a life-saving and novel intervention with a seriously ill patient, detailing how five teams worked together under time pressure to introduce a therapy that had not been attempted at Royal Hobart Hospital before. The treatment enabled the patient to progress through a life-endangering complication, and she is now hopeful to move toward transplant.

Both Kylie and Serafina are now taking steps to share their new knowledge from the conference with their respective nursing teams.

Kylie says, “This experience has undoubtedly enriched my professional development and the knowledge gained will be instrumental in enhancing the quality of education and patient care in our state (Tasmania)”

Serafina echoes this saying, “This is an invaluable experience that has allowed me to increase my knowledge surrounding haemtaology and blood and keep current with nursing practices around Australia and New Zealand”.

Arrow’s travel and conference scholarships are an important part of how we help improve outcomes for patients having bone marrow and stem cell transplants. If you are a nurse, allied health professional, researcher or data manager working in haematology, please visit our nurse scholarships and travel and conference scholarships pages to learn more.