Farewell Deborah Longmore

A four-decade career of helping others draws to a close for Orange’s Deborah Longmore.

After a 41-year career in pub­lic pathol­o­gy, Deb­o­rah Long­more closed the door of NSW Health Pathology’s Trans­fu­sion Ser­vice based at Orange Health Ser­vice, for the last time recently.

Born and raised in Orange, Deb­o­rah says her job came with a bit of luck when at the end of her stud­ies she dropped into Orange Hos­pi­tal to enquire if they had any work and was asked to start Mon­day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

“Pathol­o­gy has giv­en me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­bine what I love – sci­ence and peo­ple. It has also enabled me to grow, net­work, learn and be part of projects improv­ing the ser­vice of pub­lic pathol­o­gy across New South Wales,” Deb­o­rah said.

“There is always some­thing inter­est­ing going on, and I would­n’t change it for the world. Being able to make a dif­fer­ence to patients is what I’ve loved about my career.”

For the past 33 years Deb­o­rah has man­aged the Trans­fu­sion Ser­vice, which plays a crit­i­cal role ensur­ing blood prod­ucts are avail­able to patients, many in life threat­en­ing sit­u­a­tions where every sec­ond counts.

While she is hum­ble about her career achieve­ments, Deb­o­rah can be cred­it­ed for the intro­duc­tion of the trau­ma esky on the Orange and West­ern NSW heli­copter ser­vices in the ear­ly 2000s. A life chang­ing ini­tia­tive, the trau­ma esky car­ries three units of O neg­a­tive blood, which is a blood prod­uct that can be used irre­spec­tive of blood type and enables trans­fu­sion on the spot rather than at the hos­pi­tal. Deb­o­rah saw the esky being used in a tri­al which was hap­pen­ing at West­mead Hospital.

Deb­o­rah says she also got lot of sat­is­fac­tion talk­ing at donor col­lec­tion ser­vice nights and answer­ing ques­tions and shar­ing her knowl­edge at con­fer­ences, pre-COVID.

“I was sec­ond in charge of bio­chem­istry when I was asked to look after the blood bank for what I thought was a week or two. While I knew a bit about blood, I have edu­cat­ed myself a lot, and net­work­ing and talk­ing to oth­ers in Aus­tralia and inter­na­tion­al­ly has been a tremen­dous expe­ri­ence,” she says. “In my career, I’ve seen pub­lic pathol­o­gy go from strength to strength and the gov­er­nance and stan­dard­i­s­a­tion of process­es has been a sig­nif­i­cant part of the change,” she says.

On her retire­ment, Deb­o­rah says she plans to ease into it.

“I’m look­ing for­ward to being able to go to the gym unin­ter­rupt­ed, do a bit of gar­den­ing and spend time with my grand­sons. And then who knows, we might trav­el,” she says.

Rapidly building a pipeline of critical talent to fill roles via statewide bulk recruitment campaigns as a new and innovative way to approach recruitment.

The impor­tance of explor­ing inno­v­a­tive ways to seek and attract the right peo­ple for the right roles has nev­er been more impor­tant than now.

We are only ever as good as our peo­ple and are com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing our pro­fes­sion­al growth, devel­op­ment and capa­bil­i­ties to deliv­er the spe­cial­ist ser­vices our com­mu­ni­ties and part­ners rely on us for.

As a result of the work­force impacts of COVID-19, NSW Health Pathol­o­gy estab­lished a Recruit­ment and Capac­i­ty Build­ing Work­ing Par­ty to explore options and strate­gies for how best we devel­op and sup­port peo­ple and cul­ture, in line with our strate­gic priorities.

One of the strate­gies iden­ti­fied by this work­ing par­ty was to rapid­ly build a pipeline of crit­i­cal tal­ent to fill roles via statewide bulk recruit­ment cam­paigns as a new and inno­v­a­tive way to approach recruitment.

As a long-term strat­e­gy, bulk recruit­ment cam­paigns are not designed to replace our cur­rent way of recruit­ing, rather com­ple­ment our cur­rent process­es and sup­port local recruit­ment actions when there is a need. It offers us a stream­lined way of recruit­ing mul­ti­ple peo­ple to mul­ti­ple roles at dif­fer­ent loca­tions while also cre­at­ing a greater oppor­tu­ni­ty to rapid­ly build our eli­gi­bil­i­ty lists for future recruit­ment needs and sup­port the increased num­ber of COVID-19 relat­ed roles.

This addi­tion­al approach to the way we attract and recruit tal­ent is anoth­er exam­ple of how we, as one statewide team, dis­play our pio­neer­ing spir­it – for all of us. NSW Health Pathol­o­gy are lead­ing the way with this ini­tia­tive and are excit­ed to col­lab­o­rate and share our learn­ings and results with our NSW Health colleagues.

Our genomics team has used cutting edge technology and expertise to help keep us safe through COVID-19.

NSW Health Pathology’s Insti­tute of Clin­i­cal Pathol­o­gy and Med­ical Research (ICPMR) genomics team has worked tire­less­ly through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team uses cut­ting edge tech­nol­o­gy and exper­tise to deliv­er sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs that have pro­vid­ed the cor­ner­stone of dis­ease detec­tion and man­age­ment to keep us safe.

Their efforts through­out the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic have saved thou­sands of lives, pre­vent­ed fur­ther out­breaks and recent­ly saw the ICPMR team recog­nised with the NSW Health Secretary’s Award for Inte­grat­ed Val­ue Based Care.

NSW Health Pathology’s ICPMR team at West­mead Hos­pi­tal con­ducts world-class pub­lic health and research, work­ing close­ly with col­leagues at the West­mead Insti­tute of Med­ical Research, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney and the West­ern Syd­ney Local Health District.

Togeth­er, their com­bined research made it pos­si­ble to allow trac­ing of COVID-19 trans­mis­sion, fast iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of vari­ants of con­cern and time­ly detec­tion of drug resis­tance in new vari­ants as they emerged dur­ing the peak of the pandemic.

At its core, this work was about col­lab­o­ra­tion, tak­ing inno­v­a­tive lab­o­ra­to­ry work and pulling togeth­er dif­fer­ent pieces of health data to dis­cov­er new ways to con­trol the world-chang­ing pan­dem­ic as it happened.

ICPMR’s genom­ic epi­demi­ol­o­gist, Dr Ali­cia Arnott, said “We’ve pulled togeth­er as a team and under­tak­en some­thing that had­n’t been done in NSW before to inform pan­dem­ic con­trol and responses”.

NSW Health Pathology’s Direc­tor of Pub­lic Health Pathol­o­gy and ICPMR, Pro­fes­sor Dominic Dwyer, said “this has been the biggest emer­gency in infec­tious dis­eases for the last 100 years. We’re talk­ing about mil­lions and mil­lions of infec­tions around the world. This work has been crit­i­cal­ly important”.

Pro­fes­sor Dwyer describes the award-win­ning ICPMR genomics team as “the unsung heroes”.

“There are a lot of peo­ple doing a lot of work and a lot of hours to ben­e­fit the health of peo­ple in NSW and keep our com­mu­ni­ty safe.”