Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Blogging a conference

I am currently at the Gold Coast attending a conference about recruitment and retention of health professionals. I had great intentions of writing heaps about all the sessions but needless to say, that hasn't happened. One problem is getting access to the Internet. I have my lap top but wireless Internet at the hotel where I am attending the conference is charging $14 per hour!!! So here I am, back with the sweaty geek boys at an Internet cafe.

Yesterday was great because I met up with a fellow Pom and PhD student, Mary Sidebottem. Mary is looking at the experience of British midwives who re-locate to Queensland. The main reason for emigrating is for a change of lifestyle. But they find midwifery very different in Australia than it is in the UK, especially in the private sector. The lack of autonomy is a real challenge and in some cases has led to midwives wanting to return to the UK. Mary's research is ongoing but should be really interesting to us in New Zealand because we have a lot of UK midwives moving to NZ. This is something I have thought about for a long time and I believe would be worth replicating here. Mary is hoping to join the online midwifery meetings because she working on her own and misses the support of fellow students.


I have been focusing on people's presentation styles following my own change of style to use 'presentation 2.0'. People are still using a lot of text but in the end I didn't care as long as the speaker had a interesting presentation style and didn't read from their notes all the time. I thought my presentation went well and I was pleased with the images I choose. I ran out of time so really need to pay attention to that. I will put some audio to my slides when I get home and post them on Slideshare.

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