In May, Minette delivered an invited paper at the 57th Annual meeting of the Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology in the picturesque port city of Porto in Portugal.  

The invitation was to contribute to a growing interdisciplinary collaboration between AEPC and South Africa at joint session on 10 May, entitled: Forging Global partnerships for interdisciplinary healthcare collaboration and research advancement for nursing and allied healthcare professions.

This collaboration all started in 2017, when two colleagues, Prof Ewa-Lena Bratt from Sweden and Alexia Joachim from the UCT Children’s Heart Disease Unit in Cape Town met at a conference just like this one. Over the last 7 years, the work that they started doing together has yielded clinical practice results, with positive implications for transitioning adolescents from paediatric to adult cardiology services in Cape Town. It was good to hear about their work in the first paper of the session, entitled Synergising Research and Clinical Practice through collaborative Endeavours and provided a perfect introduction to the participative and engaged session.  

The conference invitation was to describe: Empowering Africa's Future: Advancing Pediatric Nursing for Local Impact and Global Growth. The topic provided a real opportunity to describe the broad and exciting building work of our Unit over the last two decades and we were grateful for the excellent opportunity the invitation provided.