Practice and Nursing Issues Committee News

As we head into Spring, the Practice and Nursing Issues Committee is busy with various projects on behalf of the membership. To remind you of who and what we are, the committee works under the umbrella of the Professional Education and Training Committee to monitor and address practice and professional issues, particularly those of specific relevance to nurses. Although we are focused largely on nursing issues, we wish to foster the inter-disciplinary approach to travel health. Indeed, one of our main aims is to encourage multidisciplinary collaboration in practice.

In common with many others in ISTM, we are trying to promote communication and collaboration among professionals involved in travel health worldwide. A great way of achieving this is through the setting up of local, regional and national travel health groups. This has happened successfully in several countries. In the UK, for example, what started as a small interested group of nurses in 1990, has now evolved into a national travel health forum with several thousand members. In the US there is an active movement to promote local and regional networks of travel health nurses. In the New York City region, a group of thirty enthusiastic travel health nurses have been meeting regularly since 1999. They have established a website, www.travelhealthnursing.com, dedicated to travel health nursing and to share information and encourage communication. If any of you out there are thinking about setting up a group in your own area, but are in need of a bit of guidance about how to go about it, please get in touch with us.

One of the committee’s most exciting tasks at the moment is helping to make the next ISTM conference as enjoyable, interesting and relevant as possible for nurses. Innsbruck was great in terms of nurse input and stimulating program content, and we are sure that CISTM8, New York 2003 will be even better. We will also be working to help ensure that continuing education units/points (CEU) are available for nurses attending the conference.

Still on the topic of CISTM8 – we once again encourage those of you who have carried out interesting work or research, to please submit your proposals for presentation in New York. We know there is a lot of good work going on out there – so please share it with the rest of us. If some of you are thinking about carrying out a piece of work but don’t know where to start, the good news is that the committee is working on a packet comprising basic guidance on what to consider prior to commencing a research project - so watch this space.

Signing off for now......,

Practice and Nursing Issues Co-chairs,

Fiona Genasi
Scottish Centre for Infection
(Fiona.Genasi@scieh.csa.scot.nhs.uk)

Rebecca Acosta
Travel Medicine Service of New York
(rwacosta@travelersmedical.com)