Course Access
Betty Maesula Ramolelea, our conference scholarship winner in 2022, shares her feedback about her experience.
Betty is the Infection, Prevention & Control (IPC) Nurse Manager at the National Referral Hospital, Solomon Islands. Her role involves coordinating innovative IPC and anti-microbial resistance (AMR) activities across the hospital, as well as exploring new initiatives, research and surveillance. She also works with partners across various health and community settings in the Pacific region promoting mutual learning, education and awareness.
“Attaining the ACIPC International Conference Scholarship successfully impacted my role as an IPC team leader and coordinator of IPC in our referral hospital, which has a bed occupancy of 100% almost every day.
Attending the 2022 conference has empowered me and my IPC colleagues here in the Solomon Islands to take ownership and improve audits, data collection and surveillance. It helped me to better understand the importance of baseline data and information sharing, policies and SOPs, which has helped with the challenges we face here in under-resourced countries.
After the conference, I was able to systematically put audit tools together and set up our IPC programs to effectively reduce surgical site infections and bloodstream infections, along with appropriate standard precautions and cohorting implementation as a team. The training program for all our healthcare workers is more organised and checks and balances in place for the audits to be monitored effectively.
Health care workers are also participating more in our IPC activities to combat AMR, and collaboration with the micro labs, pharmacy and the treating doctors has resulted in better communications at our hospital.
On behalf of our IPC unit, I would like to thank ACIPC for the opportunity, and look forward to seeing the achievements of future candidates.”