The 2018 lecture
The Ivan Lester Memorial Lecture was held at Cairns Base Hospital, with Paul Muscio, Robert Pozzi, Will Bryceson, Anthony Kresevic and Andrew Graham.
Paul, who retired a few years ago, was invited to deliver the 2018 lecture to the Cairns medical community. A good speech, Paul.
What a memorial lecture is
A memorial lecture is a named annual lecture established in honour of a doctor who contributed to a hospital or to a specialty. The format is deliberately simple. A speaker is invited each year and addresses the local medical community, often on a subject connected to the person being remembered or to the direction the specialty is taking.
Lectures of this kind serve a purpose beyond commemoration. A hospital's institutional memory is short, because junior staff rotate through every few months and consultants come and go over the years. A named lecture is one of the few mechanisms that keeps a hospital's own history in front of the people currently working in it, and it gives senior and retired clinicians a formal occasion on which to pass on what they learned.
Why it matters at a regional hospital
Cairns Base Hospital is the main referral hospital for far north Queensland. Regional hospitals sit a long way from the capital city teaching centres where most conferences and courses are held, which makes the events they run themselves more important rather than less.
An annual lecture also brings the local medical community together across specialties, which happens less often than it does in a large city hospital. Physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, general practitioners and trainees in the same room for an evening is not a trivial outcome in a hospital where each group otherwise works largely within its own department.
Related information
See our other Cairns posts, including operating at Cairns Base Hospital, and our shoulder surgery page.