A message from your PDCs: Conference series 2025

On behalf of the professional development coordinators for general practice nursing (PDCGPNs) and the National Immunisation Office (NIO), we are delighted to present this year’s immunisation conference series: ‘Empowering nurses, protecting communities’.

The theme of our conference series this year is: ‘Immunisation for all’, with a special focus on inclusion of our vulnerable and hard-to-reach communities. The event will welcome speakers from the NIO, Public Health, Social Inclusion, and, most importantly, service user representation.

As part of a diverse and exciting agenda, we will be facilitating presentations, interviews, and ‘skills’ sessions designed to assist general practice teams in the administration and management of vaccine clinics, thus improving uptake, record keeping, and ensuring quality in practice.

There will be four events in 2025 as follows:

• Kilkenny, March 27;
• Limerick, April 2;
• Dublin, April 9;
• Carrick-on-Shannon, April 30.

Last year’s conference series was a huge success and provided hundreds of GPNs from all over Ireland with opportunities for practice development, professional networking, and information sharing.

Topics discussed at the events ranged from professional practice considerations to immunisation schedules and programmes, vaccine hesitancy, declining vaccine uptake, and medication management, among multiple other pertinent topics.

Issues specific to each healthcare region were also addressed, as were the Primary Childhood Immunisation Catch-up Programme and catch-up vaccinations for refugees and applicants seeking protection. 

Dr Áine McNamara, Area Director of Public Health, HSE West and North West, gave the opening address at the Athlone and Sligo meetings last year and described the conference series as “a wonderful educational opportunity for those central to the delivery of our immunisation programmes”, as well as “a very timely and useful event”.

Feedback from GPNs and other members of the 800 plus delegates that attended the series was also extremely positive and we expect a large turnout again this year.

The 2024 conference series utilised the cloud-based software Padlet to easily share information with attendees via QR codes both on and after the events. If you would like to sample just some of the valuable information that was shared last year, a toolkit of resources and presentation slides from the 2024 series is available for all GPNs nationally at: www.padlet.com/mariecantwell/national-immunisation-conference-series-q2plh0vkn6gpakv9.

Your PDCGPNs look forward to seeing you again, or meeting you for the first time, this year. We advise all our GPN colleagues not to miss out and save the date now.

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