Gillian Rozenberg proved that COVID-19 was no obstacle as she hit the digital highway in her mission to upskill NSW Pathology staff.

In ear­ly 2020, Gillian Rozen­berg, Senior Med­ical Sci­en­tist in Haema­tol­ogy at NSW Health Pathol­o­gy-Rand­wick, was plan­ning on hang­ing up her lab coat after more than 40 years in NSW’s pub­lic pathol­o­gy service.

But before her tran­si­tion into a well-earned retire­ment, she felt a call­ing to pass on her exten­sive knowl­edge in the area of mor­phol­o­gy by going on the road for a year to teach rur­al and region­al staff her craft in two-day face-to-face workshops.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Gillian’s plans for a statewide train­ing road trip were brought to a grind­ing halt with the out­break of COVID-19.

With the world at a stand­still, Gillian was deter­mined to sol­dier on and still deliv­er her exper­tise to NSW Pathol­o­gy staff all over the state. The solu­tion was deliv­er­ing her cours­es through video con­fer­enc­ing via zoom.

Gillian received valu­able sup­port from the Learn­ing and Devel­op­ment and Human Resources teams, in par­tic­u­lar, Siob­han Cun­liffe who helped devel­op a course that could be seam­less­ly deliv­ered online to a diverse work­force. The course offered five, two-hour zoom ses­sions over a three-week peri­od. Each par­tic­i­pant received an exten­sive book­let that con­tained slides for future reference.

In under 12 months Gillian and the team were able to reach 118 staff across NSW which helped ensure her wealth of knowl­edge was passed on to our cur­rent and emerg­ing sci­en­tists and technicians.

This achieve­ment recent­ly earned Gillian and Siob­han the Sup­port­ing Our Peo­ple Team Award in the 2021 NSW Health Pathol­o­gy Awards.

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