Conni's own Suze Callahan flew to Adelaide last week for the annual CoNSA conference to deliver the 2016 Conni Award.
A great time as always catching up with the clinicians and catching up with the goss!  

CONGRATULATIONS TO Janie Thompson, winner of the Conni Award.
Of course Congratulations to Vicki Patton for the Commendation Award.

Thank you to all who applied for the Award, we encourage you to keep applying each year, keep learning, keep delivering new ideas, keep up the research and development.  

The Conni Awards have been running since 2004 when our inaugural winner Donna Coates won a trip to Montreal to attend the International Continence Conference.
Each year since, Conni has been sponsoring continence nurses to conferences around the world in recognition of the work they and their collegues do and in order to improve the knowledge of our nurses.
Entries are open to all health professionals working in the field of continence management who are financial members of CoNSA.

We have published Suze's delivery speech for you all:

"On behalf of Glenys and the team at Conni, it gives me great pleasure to be here tonight to present the 2016 Conni Awards.  Since 2004, the Conni Awards have been recognising the hard work and dedication of Continence Clinicians throughout Australia.   Thank you to all who applied this year.

Glenys  is currently attending the SUNA conference in Washington DC with last year’s Conni Award winner Lisa Wragg. She sends her apologizes but due to travels schedules and international date lines, she just could not make it back in time to attend tonight meeting  but she sends her regards to you all

The first award I would like to present tonight is the Conni Care Commendation.  The winner of this award will receive $500 towards attending a Continence conference of their choice in the coming 12 months.   

The winner of the Conni Care Commendation works full time as a Clinical Nurse Consultant at St George Public Hospital in Sydney.  She is a Distance Educator at NSW College Nursing and also a PhD Candidate.  This clinician has had several research articles published (and our judging panel were impressed by her poem on her Conni Award application too)

2016 Conni Award Vicki Patton 02

I am happy to announce the 2016 Conni Care Commendation winner is Vicki Patton.

The 2016 Conni Award wins flights and accommodation for travel to the International Continence Society World Conference in Florence Italy in September 2017.

This year’s winner is a strong advocate for people with continence, bladder and bowel concerns. She is committed to promoting continence awareness within the community and to the support/mentoring of colleagues within the field.  

In her role as Continence Service manager at Alfred Health (Caulfield Hospital) her key areas of responsibility include Patient assessment, discharge planning, staff education and supporting the Urology unit.

Since 2008, she has lead the team at the Caulfield Continence clinic and overseen the day to day management of the service. She is responsible for staff management, finances, forward planning and change management.  

As a strong voice within the Continence field, I am sure that this year’s winner is familiar to you all. She has frequently been the facilitator and presenter at National Incontinence Conferences and  is the current Victorian representative of CoNSA, the Victorian/Tasmania President from October 2011-2015. Since 2013, she has been the National President of CoNSA.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the winner of the 2016 Conni Awards is Janie Thompson"

2016 Conni Award Janie Thompson 2