Saturday, 11 October 2008

EfCCNa Congress, Florence

EfCCNa Congress
October 9-11th, 2008

The 3rd European Federation of Critical care Nurses (EfCCNa) & 27th Aniarti Congress was held at Fortessa da Basso in Firenze. The theme was Influencing Critical Care Nursing in Europe.

The conference has definitely broadened my horizon on emergency and critical care nursing practices, research and professional nursing opportunities.

With over 2,000 professionals in attendance at the conference, the atmosphere was vibrant, active, inspiring and stimulating. I felt really privileged to be part of such a wonderful experience and such an amazing network of professionals. I really loved the opportunity to meet and talk with the various national and international colleagues. I conversed with greater ease in Italian and felt more confident and able to express myself. I'm just so thrilled to have attended. It was so impressive and one of the best conferences I've ever attended.


Although issues of concern in critical care appear to be universal, the strategies used to address these issues appears to vary greatly and often depends upon staff education and experiences, human resources, hospital funding, patient to nurse ratio, traditions and cultural emphasis.

The conference sessions were run simultaneously in four different salons, and were simultaneously translated into English and there were over 100 professional posters on display.
posters.



I attended a broad spectrum of topics presented by a cross range of international speakers: some talks presented the research from evidence based practices; some presented a summary of the current literature; and others discussed specific professional experiences and their management. Amongst the many talks I attended were: family presence in resuscitation (Italy); restraining patients in ICU (Turkey), the value of SVO2 monitoring in haemodynamic monitoring (USA); assessing delirium in patients in ICU (Denmark); managing noise levels in ICU (UK); therapeutic significance of nursing care (Poland, USA); MSF management of malnutrition in Africa (Italy); colostomy management of newborns (India); oral hygiene and maintenance (Israel).

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