March 16, 2012 Friday.
So I didn’t get around to updating the blog yesterday—too much going on. The car will pick us up in a couple of hours for Sydney Airport and our long-awaited trip to Cairns (pronounced locally as “cans”) and the great barrier reef. So there will be more about that later.

My new colleagues at CHI (Center for Health Initiatives) really made my day interesting, yesterday—even more than usual. I ran into Don Iverson and his wife having coffee on my way into the office, and spent a half-hour chatting with them and sharing some stories about
mutual friends back in the States. Public health can make the world seem really small and personal sometimes; maybe it’s the personal contacts and shared over the years that makes the field so special—in addition to the special nature of the work, of course. After we broke up our coffee club, I went into the office and spent some time discussing PhD thesis projects with a couple of graduate students. They both are working on a project to get older adults to recognize the symptoms of undiagnosed asthma and seek more information and follow-up services through the local asthma organization. The discussion was interesting and fun! It is amazing how health related systems in the US and Australia can be both so similar and so different. We talked a lot about the challenges of working with community based organizations. They completed an impressive amount of work and I gave their thesis supervisor a good report, including a short list of issues I recommended they think about further.

Later I went into a meeting with the Director and one of her senior project staff working on an “acquired hospital infection” project. Again the discussion turned to the challenges (and benefits) of working with local organizations and professions—especially those that cross
many lines of operation and interest. We went over several options and decided on an approach to the project that would fulfill three goals: respond to the interests of the project sponsor; apply a systematic social marketing approach to project design and intervention; achieve the stated objective relating to reduction of hospital acquired infections. It was a great professional discussion and I wish I could be here long enough to participate in the success of the project.
But alas, time is already drawing short with only one more week in Wollongong. As the locals say…”We love the Gong!”