Mater Research and Mater Mothers' Hospitals representatives chaired, presented and participated in the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Congress in March, aiming to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes for all.

Mater’s Professor Helen Liley and conference co-chair said the conference was attended by more than 800 delegates.

“It was a great team effort as we only had about 10 months to get it organised due to a location change to the Gold Coast and we rashly signed up to lead the organising committee,” Prof Liley said.

“Given these circumstances we could not have done it without the enthusiastic and expert contributions of Mater colleagues on our organising committee,” she said.

The Mater People who assisted as members of the organising committee were Andrew Shearman (co-chair), A/Prof Sam Bora, Prof Vicki Clifton (who also chaired the abstract review and awards and supervised a group of student volunteers), Dr Glenn Gardener, Dr Mary Ghazawy, A/Prof Peter Gray, Prof Vicki Flenady, A/Prof Luke Jardine and Prof Sailesh Kumar. A/Prof Aimee Catalan coordinated sponsorship.

“In the spirit of collaboration, we also roped in to our organising committee colleagues in midwifery, neonatal nursing and maternal fetal medicine at Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital and Gold Coast University Hospital,” Prof Liley said.

One of the conference objectives was to ‘showcase’ perinatal research and clinical care in South East Queensland and at Australia’s largest maternity facility, Mater Mothers’ Hospitals.

“My colleagues at Mater Mothers’ and Mater Research gave superb presentations, expertly chaired sessions, contributed to judging awards for invited posters and oral presentations and helped to make our international speakers feel really welcome,” she said.

“PSANZ is an organisation that aims to bring together a wide variety of clinicians and scientists, to form bridges from basic science to clinical care and to encourage students and early career researchers. The feedback we received from the conference attendees was very enthusiastic and suggested we had filled all these objectives and more”.

“Everyone we asked to contribute more than rose to the occasion and we are most grateful,” Prof Liley said.