Best Poster Prize for TCRN Team

A poster by the TCRN HSA Biobank team received Best Poster honours at the Cancer Institute of New South Wales Innovation in Cancer Treatment Conference in late October this year.

Led by Nicki Meagher, Project Manager, Biobanking and Data Linkage at the TCRN, the poster was a collaborative effort displaying the key achievements of the HSA Biobank. It was one of 24 posters submitted for consideration at the conference.

The HSA Biobank aims to embed processes for biobanking consent and sample collection into routine hospital workflows. It has been rolled out on the Randwick campus and St George hospital campus over last two years. The TCRN has also been a leading partner on a series of Cancer Institute NSW funded projects to support implementation across other NSW hospital sites.

“Hospital-based research initiatives are often quite external to existing hospital processes. What we were aiming to do with our project was to create biobanking processes that became part of existing hospital processes, resulting in higher consent rates and better engagement from hospital staff,” Nicki says.

This year's conference was themed around the developmetn of a quality cancer system. The HSA Biobank makes a valuable contribution to cancer care by providing a framework for biobanking processes that support translational cancer research.