Live Blog: Uluru ! 2012 [Thursday]
Uluru is sacred to the Anangu, the Aboriginal people of the area. The area around the formation is home to a plethora of springs, waterholes, rock caves and ancient paintings. Uluru is listed as a World Heritage Site.
Media Journalism by…
Martin Gill: Perfusionist
Editor, ANCZP Gazette
(Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney Australia)
Editor’s Note:
To view the entire Uluru series, Click Here…
This opportunity is provided by the efforts of, Mr. Martin Gill, perfusionist, who is attending this meeting in Australia’s Wild West so to speak..
His previous live conference blog (the 1st here @ ‘Surfers) can be read by clicking here…
Why a Live Blog ?
The intention here @ CircuitSurfers is to offer up a library of these types of objective POV’s (Points of View) to highlight conferences as well as “personalize” what a potential attendee can expect if deciding to participate.
Uluru Conference:
Waking Up: Day 1:
Woke up this morning feeling very refreshed following a great outback evening (this is in stark contrast to my wife who is back in Sydney and apparently woke up rather groggy after being up most of the evening with one or more of my 4 kids).
I made my way down to the breakfast hall and had a great breakfast with Steve Sutton and his lovely wife Eve.
As i already mentioned Steve is one of our keynote speakers this year. Over breakfast it became clear that Steve has an unrivalled passion for perfusion history and shared many stories with us and even some phenomenal video footage of an early heart lung machine. I can not wait to see his presentations over the coming days.
Well it is just about time for the meeting to start.
10 months of hard work as a member of both the scientific committee and the organising committee have gone into to this moment… what could possibly go wrong…..
The delegates have almost all arrived, checked in, registered, got there programs and satchels, and are now making there way to the adjoining conference facility.
The first session is the paediatric breakout session.
First up, yours truly- i am presenting a case study of a completion of Fontan patient that intraoperativley had an unusually unresponsive low NIRS and low mean arterial blood pressure despite multiple interventions; this was all in the face of good venous sats, low lactate, good urine output, Hct > 30%. My aim is to generate discussion on the appropriateness of the interventions vs the potential distraction of technology.
The second breakout session is the ECLS breakout session.
This session commenced with an informal presentation from Keith Adkiins. This presentation centred around ECMO retrieval with subsequent discussion being dominated by the institutionalised tolerance of fatigue within our profession. A particular example of this is the question of whether it is appropriate to travel massive distances over long time frames and then turn around and bring the patient back- alternatively would it be more appropriate to stablise the patient, rest and then return. Following this discussion the trials and tribulations of anticoagulation monitoring for ECLS patients was discussed- the conclusion of this discussion (which was hard to disagree with) was that there existed more questions than answers.
The third and final session of the day was the popular `fire side chat`.
This session commenced with Tim Wilcox discussing PIRS- the perfusion incident reporting system. This data base is now open internationally. The problem of adherence to the submission of data to such data bases was highlighted. Possible suggestions to improve submission were a smart phone `App`, improved PR and feedback from the data base. It was commonly felt that such a data base is vital to the improvement in practice for perfusionists, yet this value can only be maximised with increased submission.
I think it is only fair to declare that the third and final session took place with canopes and drinks- i therefore will stop here before my grammar and spelling deteriorate to a lower level than its already poor baseline.
Cheers
Martin.
To go to Friday’s Session- Click Here …
Picture taken by Dan…
Petroglyphs @ Uluru
=
Aerial view, Uluru
