Dr Trent Yarwood
Trent is an infectious diseases physician at Cairns Hospital, where he is responsible for the antimicrobial stewardship program. He also sees patients at the Cairns Sexual Health clinic where he has an interest in managing HIV+ patients with medical comorbidities. Trent is undertaking post-fellowship training in public health medicine as part of the communicable disease control team at Tropical Public Health Services (Cairns). His current research is on Group A Streptococcal skin diseases, and medical staff attitudes towards antibiotic prescribing and antibiotic resistance. His other clinical interests are infection control in healthcare settings and in communicable disease epidemiology.
Trent is an adjunct Senior Lecturer with the James Cook University School of Medicine & Dentistry, and an Associate Lecturer with the University of Queensland Rural Clinical School. He has two children and is a member of the JCU Fencing Squad.
Better than a notebook
You know how you used to take your conference notes on the notepad in the conference satchel?
What did you do with them? Mine are sitting in a pile on the bookshelf, along with all the abstract books from the conferences I've been to. I don't think I've looked back through the notes more than 4 or 5 times, and I think I've looked up an abstract that I kinda remembered twice.
You might have moved on to taking your notes on a laptop. Do you print them out? Or file them away in a "conference notes" folder? or are they somewhere in your general documents folder with an obscure name like "Brisbane HIV Conf Sep 15.docx"? I bet they probably don't get looked at much more than the notepads.
I've moved to taking my conference notes on twitter. It takes some practice belting out a 140 character tweet for important ideas in each presentation, but it has the great benefit of making it accessible - to others at the conference, but also to people who might be following at home, by following the official conference tag.
You can then use a tool like storify to aggregate your tweets into a single webpage - for easy sharing, and to refer back to (or not) later on. My tip if you do this, is to aggregate them each night. I tried to go back to my AIDS2014 tweets after a couple of weeks and it was much harder (impossible) to do easily.
Here's the collections of my tweets from the conference for you.
I hope to see more people doing it next year; my request for the organisers is to make the official #hashtag shorter - how about #ashm16 or at least #hivaids16 please?
Day 1: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/hiv-aids-conference-2015-day-1
Day 2: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/hiv-aids-conference-day-2
Day 3: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/australian-hiv-aids-conference-2015-day-3