5 April 2012

2012 Annual Scientific Meeting Program

AFOEM is hosting its Annual ASM on Monday 7 May - Wednesday 9 May 2012 and welcomes you to attend. To view the program, please click on the image to your right.

Click here to go to the AFOEM section of the RACP Congress website.

For all enquiries regarding the ASM, email afoem@racp.ed.au.

  (click image to dowload program)

24 February 2012

New Zealand Workshop

A proposed workshop will be held in Auckland, New Zealand on Saturday, 4 August 2012.

The key themes for the workshop are:

1. Fitness for Work - A more Objective Approach to the Management of Fatigue, Management and Pain
2. Cultural Competence in New Zealand - Cultural & Occupational Factors in the 20th & 21st Centuries
3. Peer Review Options

For detail information of this workshop, please click here.

(click photo to dowload flyer)

25 January 2012

Professor Dame Carol Black

Professor Dame Carol Black will be conferred as an Honorary Fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in May 2012 at the College's Graduation ceremony. She will also be joining the Faculty's Annual Training Meeting and Annual Scientific Meeting at Congress. The Faculty is delighted to welcome Dame Carol back to Australia, and to celebrate her Honorary Fellowship.

Dame Carol Black has championed the Faculty's Health Benefits of Work policy and advocacy projects since 2010.

Deborah Lockart, AFOEM Senior Executive Officer, meets with Dame Carol in Wellington, New Zealand in February.

Professor Dame Carol Black 

(click photo to enlarge)

13 January 2012

Vital Role of The Supervisor in Trainee Learning

In 2011, the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (AFOEM) introduced a new curriculum. Continuing challenges for us are support of our educational supervisors and regional directors of training, the gradual reshaping of summative assessment, and the accreditation of settings for training. Recognising the invaluable contribution of supervisors, work is ongoing to recruit, guide and support our teachers, to reshape summative assessments and to imaginatively accredit settings for training.

To read Dr David Goddard's article in full, please click here.

Dr David Goddard, Physician Educator, AFOEM

2 December 2011

Dr Robin Chase's Annual James Smiley Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland

Each year the Faculty of Occupational Medicine in Ireland invites an eminent scholar to deliver the James Smiley lecture. On 2 December 2011, Dr Robin Chase, President of the Australasian Faculty of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (AFOEM) delivered the 24th Annual James Smiley Lecture at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in Dublin. In addition to this honour, Dr Chase was conferred as an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Faculty of Occupational Medicine and received the James Smiley medal. The audience included Irish Fellows, the son and daughter-in-law of Dr Smiley, and the Australian Ambassador to Ireland, His Excellency Mr Bruce Davis.

To read Dr Robin Chase's lecture in full, please click here.

Dr Robin Chase (2nd from left) was conferred as an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Faculty of Occupational Medicine (click photo to enlarge)

Dr Tom Calma's  Ferguson-Glass Oration

At the 2011 RACP conference in Darwin, the Faculty had the honour of Dr Tom Calma being our Ferguson-Glass Orator. The oration was presented on the 24th of May 2011 and was a call for our continued participation in the ‘Close the gap' campaign, both as individual practitioners of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and more broadly as a Faculty and a College.

Dr Calma stressed the interconnected nature of The Close the Gap Strategy, which incorporates many stakeholders and areas as broad education, housing, nutrition, employment, and public health policy. He highlighted the RACP's role in ‘Close the Gap', crediting us as a ‘vital part of the campaign's success'.

In addressing AFOEM specifically, Dr Calma said:

‘...your work in particular is vital in the address to some of the unique stressors placed on Indigenous health in the context of the traditional lands and environments in which we live, and the challenges we face in relation to employment.'

Dr Calma also encouraged AFOEM to promote the goals of the ‘Close the Gap' campaign, by ensuring that the positive impact environment and employment can make on health, and on Indigenous health specifically, are made a high priority with policy makers, government, and business. He called on the Faculty to work in partnership with Indigenous Australians
‘to influence to promote our health at the highest circles of the economic and political worlds.'

Dr Calma is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner National Coordinator for Tackling Indigenous Smoking, Co-chair of the Close the Gap campaign for Indigenous Health, Chair of the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre as well as an Aboriginal elder from the Kungarakan tribal group and member of the Iwaidja tribal group.

Dr Tom Calma and AFOEM President Dr Robin Chase (click photo to enlarge)

Related Links:

Download the PDF of Dr Calma's Presentation

Go to the RACP 2011 Conference website

The RACP on Indigenous Health

Read the ‘close the gap' statement of intent

Watch the Department of health and Aging's ‘Break the chain'