 Okay, let me introduce myself first. I'll be the facilitator for the session and my name is Professor Deborah Davis. I'm the clinical chair here in Canberra, Australia. And it does give me enormous pleasure to facilitate this session. And it feels like we've come full circle because I was part of the organizing committee for the first ever victim and continued for the next 10 years and was around Sarah when she was dreaming up this idea. I don't have no idea how she dreamed it up, but we'll hear from Sarah in a moment to find out about that. I want to, I was customary in Australia to acknowledge the first people of this place and Australia is a country that has many First Nations countries within it. And on the land that I sit today and Sarah as well, the first people of this place are the Nanawol people and I pay my respects to them and their elders past and present. And I am always really in awe of their culture. They've had more than 60,000 years of continuous culture on this place and I cannot help but think about the women's business is what they call childbirth knowledge that has led them to be so successful. All the women that have birthed on this place, all the knowledge and skills that they have, which are largely lost to us now, to our great shame. So respects to the Nanawol people. So as I said, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Sarah to you. Sarah started this 15 years ago to celebrate the International Day of the Midwife on her kitchen table, which I remember well in Deletion, New Zealand. The first year she pretty much spent talking to herself. There weren't a lot of, actually, I think I remember having five people in one of our first sessions and who would have guessed, she says all these years later, that a global pandemic would also make the virtual conference such an everyday occurrence. We're all very familiar with it, but 15 years ago it was really a groundbreaking initiative. So in this presentation, Sarah will be reflecting on the lessons she's learned over the years. As she's been facilitating the victim, she'll talk about leadership collaboration and innovation. I'm lucky enough to work. I'm in a similar department now with Sarah. We've both moved from New Zealand and she's very much a valued colleague and friend. So welcome, Sarah, and thank you for your initiative. And I'm looking forward to hearing about it today. Thank you so much, Deb. I'm just absolutely thrilled to be here. Yes, gosh, you can believe it, that 15 years ago we were in Dunneeden, working in New Zealand, working on this as an idea. And here we are now, 15 years later, and the Virtual International Day of the Midwife is still going strong. And in your introduction, you said you were first committee. I think committee is a little bit of an exaggeration. I think it's just you and me, wasn't it just mulling things over glass and wine every now and again. So thank you and thank you, everybody. I am now, I am missing my pointy arrow thingy to move my slides a lot, unless I can't see for looking. Lorraine, are you able to help me with that? I probably haven't made you present us, Sarah, I'm sorry. Okay. While Deb does that, I love this photo. That's my daughter, actually, Ellen, who is now a nurse. And who knows, maybe one day she'll be a midwife. I'm looking very energetic there. So I was asked by the Organising Committee to sort of reflect on the last 15 years of my experience with the Virtual International Day of the Midwife. And but as I just want to repeat what Deb said, and that is to acknowledge that we're on the land of the Ngunnawal people and the Nambri people. And I'm just so very, very grateful and blessed and privileged to be on that land. And I too would like to pay my respects to their elders past and present and emerging and pay my respect to all Indigenous peoples, particularly midwives across the whole world. Thank you. And I'm not quite sure what's happened to this slide and we've missed one of the photos, but anyway, this is just a couple of photos from the Canberra area where I am so lucky to be living. So that's me and that is Blackie the Cat. And we started the Virtual International Day midwife 15 years ago. Sorry, we've already said that, haven't we? And it was very much came out as a really a thinking about, I might put the slide back in, that I was at the bottom of the world, seemed to me at the time. And I just felt so isolated, I guess, maybe one word, it sounds a bit dramatic. But so then back, so that was 2008, 2009. And we started to think about so how can we connect with people around the world? And today, in today's session, I want to just talk about three things that there's lots of things we've learned over the years, but three elements, three things that I've learned being involved with the Virtual International Day, the midwife, that hopefully we can not only take forward with it in our midwifery, not only take forward, not only as the Virtual International Day, midwife grows and continues, hopefully for years to come, but that we can take into our lives as practising midwives. And those three things that I'm just identified for today is recognising opportunities, is leadership. And part of that is recognising opportunities, having passion and being resolute. So the day came about because everybody went off and left me. I was left, I think it was about 2008, I think something like that. And there was a big ICM conference in South Africa. And as you can see there, that's our notice board. And all the lectures put when we were back, if we're in and if we're out, and you'll see by net binding that I was only one in and everybody else had gone over to South Africa for the ICM, the International Confederation of Midwives. And I was left by myself and I thought, gosh, this was, I really feel like I'm missing out here. And I couldn't afford to go, I couldn't afford to take the time off, I couldn't work and obviously we couldn't all leave the office. We had to, some of us had to stay behind. And I was feeling, I have to be honest with you, female, a little hard, done by. And then I thought, well, gosh, if I'm feeling like this and I'm in a very privileged position, what are midwives feeling who are in resource poor countries? So I started to think back then, but so how can we connect with people? How can we share information, research, just even have conversations with people when we can't meet in the face-to-face context? Now I have to say, I feel a little bit sort of out of date, really talking about this now because of course, since the pandemic, I mean, all this is ho-hum, but in 2008, 2009, it was a very real question. So in terms of leadership, one of the absolute key things I think we need to think about is how do we recognize and lean into opportunities? So setting up the Virtual International Day of the Midwife was definitely an opportunity for me. There was an opportunity that I led into. I was not afraid to take the lead and people who know me know that I'm very quick to put myself out there. And that can be very difficult for some people who feel maybe a little shy, a little bit timid. And you can be forgiven for being scared about, well, what happens if it goes wrong or what if people laugh at me? But try and put those feelings aside and make them move and okay, so if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And there's always lessons to be learned there. And look how successful the VIDM has been ever since. I'm so glad that we made the move to take this opportunity. The next thing about being a leader and is having a passion and not being afraid to share that passion. I was passionate and still am. Passionate about using ways to bring midwives together, to provide opportunities for networking, to break down traditional opportunities for networking, break down, sorry, traditional barriers to professional development, to model lifelong learning practices, especially in the informal context, to model open communication and collaborative practices. And back then in 2008 or thereabouts, we were learning and getting involved in open access practices, whereby information became openly accessible and weren't put behind firewalls. And I think those issues now are just as relevant today as they were back then. And back then, of course, we were also very passionate about increasing digital literacy and capability. Again, not so much a problem now because COVID has done us a huge favor. And I think I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So those things I've just listed, but my passions, they were the aims of the virtual international dead midwife, what we wanted to achieve. When you're passionate about something, your passion will ignite the people around you. And as a leader, you have to have passion because otherwise you won't people come on board with you, won't, I hate to cliche, won't travel that journey with you. So have passion and don't be afraid to share it. Now, just looking at that picture, my golly, gosh, I live in an untidy house. Gosh, Deb, can you remember I live in an untidy, my house was used to be, I hope it's a little bit tidy now, I'm a gracious. Obviously wasn't passionate about my housework, that's for sure. So another thing about being a leader, we've talked about having a vision, being passionate, the other thing is being resolute. We had lots of ups and downs with the VIDM over the years. Lots of things that were issues, not least issues around technology, around how we market the VIDM, how we get people involved. And there was always something that would crop up that would be a big issue. But we were resolute that whatever happened, we were going to go ahead, we were going to put on the VIDM, we were going to problem solve, even if it was a big technical pool, blow up right at last minute, we would get together and collaboratively as a team, work out a solution. That picture there, the one that's on my left, cause still more pictures of the very untidy kitchen. The one on the right is me actually sitting, I think it was 2012, yes it was. I was actually in the UK. And so I was facilitating the VIDM from the UK. So dragged my computer over with me, we were, I was on holiday with family, we were in, we went on a trip, we had to find our, I don't know, would it be an Airbnb or something like that. I had to set up, I had no idea if the internet was going to work. I had no, actually we got caught up in traffic, so I was even at one point really stressing that I'd even get there in time. But we overcame it and we were absolutely resolute that we were going to do what we said we were going to do. People do try and put you off, people are naturally, I think people are naturally negative and it isn't necessarily because they mean to be, but because I think they're just afraid of failure. So be resolute, don't be put off, don't let people talk you out of what you want to do. That's certainly been a very big lesson for me in the last 15 years and actually in life generally. And bring people together with you when they are worrying about things and problem solve problems together. And then you'll find even when you're not expecting to be or you're not meaning to be, but you can be then an inspiration to people without even realizing that that's what you are. One of the things that I was just absolutely so proud of is that after a couple of years of putting on the VIDM, some colleagues around the world who were occupational therapists did then, they were so inspired by what we were doing for midwives that they did exactly the same thing for occupational therapists and their initiative, which was a similar approach, took place over quite some years. I'm very proud of the fact that we inspired others. The second element of the learnings that I've taken on board is about innovation. And there's three elements of innovation that I would like to pass on to you. Gosh, we could talk for days on end about leadership, we could talk for days on end about innovation, but these are just three tips that I would pass on the first one and again, apologies for this, I'm not quite sure what's happened to the slides, but the first element of innovation is keep things simple and focused. It's very easy to have big, wide, wild ideas, but you've got to keep things simple, especially if you're trying stuff new for the first time. And we, for the Virtual International Day, the midwife, especially in the early days, we chose technologies that were freely available, that didn't cost us any money, and that, well, I was going to say that weren't time consuming in their use. The backend work that we had to do, especially in the, you're seeing the slide as fine, I'm seeing that the slide isn't. So I think what I'm seeing is different from what you're seeing, Lorraine, so it's good that hopefully everybody can see the full slide. What was I saying? I'm distracted there. We used technologies such as Wikis, the technologies for our actual presentations have changed over the years, but we've been very lucky to have friends who've allowed us to access various technologies. We use blogs, we, and even just talking to people and connecting with people, especially in the early days, when we didn't know anyone out there who could help us, even using social media like Facebook and Twitter. I was saying that the time behind putting all these things together, it was time consuming in the early days because this was a new idea. We had to figure out what worked in terms of, say, for example, instructions and every year was a learning opportunity. And I suspect that it's the same and continues to be even after all these years, even after a pandemic when this technology is so more ubiquitous, I suspect that we learn things every year and try out new things every year. And I'm really glad to see Isha saying that she's working to kickstart things in Nigeria and that's just absolutely wonderful. So please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you need support, we'll do that. And yes, Linda is saying you're still learning curve every year, absolutely. So it's even more important for reason for keeping things simple. Actually, photo icons is me in bed. I used to do a lot of my presentations in bed. So keep it simple and focus. The second element of innovation is resilience. It's hard work being an innovator. It's hard work bringing new ideas into place. Sometimes things work and go really well. Other times it doesn't and you have to go back to the drawing board. That there here is a picture of me being dragged up a very, very steep hill. I don't know if you can see clearly enough, I'm looking exhausted and I'll tell you, I was swearing a little bit at my husband who was dragging me up the hill. But I'll tell you what, at the top of the hill, this is in Queensland, at the top of the hill, we could look at the ocean and this was during whale watching season of the whales are swimming down the coast of Australia. We were able to sit at the top of the hill though, watching the whales swim by and that was the most incredible day for me. And working in this project had exactly the same feelings. It can be tiring, it can be exhausting and that sometimes you feel like you go forward five steps and then get knocked back. But it's worth persevering and it's also worth celebrating your successes when things do work out. So very worth persevering because the reward is worth it. The third element of innovation that I would like to, that I think is important to think about as part of being an innovator, is not being afraid to take risks. Now, you may say, well, that's a bit weird. Why would you want to take risks? Well, when I say take risks, I do put a caveat around that. And I'm not suggesting you go off and do wild, crazy, wacky things that are gonna end up in loss of life. Definitely don't do that. And when you are thinking about taking risks, you also need to think about how you manage that. So you put things in place that help you manage that risk. The pictures I've put here is for some people getting on what a ferris wheel might be considered to be a very risky thing to do. And this picture here on my left, the ferris wheel with all those beautiful flowers, is our flower festival in Canberra called Floriad. And for sure, getting on top of that ferris wheel, a lot of people might not like it, especially if you've got a fear of heights. But when you get to the top of that ferris wheel, the view down is just absolutely superb. I think I took this photo a few years ago. You see, literally, can see for far distance, you can see throughout the whole of Floriad, is you can see all these beautiful flowers. And you actually, this picture here is, as you can see, is the world. And that's a beautiful metaphor. When you're taking risks, you do make mistakes. And you've got to take that. That's part of the learning process. You are going to make mistakes. And you learn by it. And you support each other when you do make those mistakes. And as I said, you put into place frameworks that hopefully those mistakes onto how to devastating and impact on what you're trying to innovate for. So learn by your mistakes. Try new things out until you find the right approach or the right model, the right fit for what you're trying to achieve. And as I said before, when things work out, you can achieve great success. Success may not be what you're thinking that you were looking for. And it might lead you in a completely different direction to where you thought you were going. And so another element around that is being agile. Don't be afraid to follow the path that you find yourself going down, even if it's a different path than what you're expecting. The second element that I've learned about through the last 15 years is the importance of collaboration. And I think that's probably one of the big lessons and the big joys and the big benefit that I found through VIDM. As Deb said, we started off in 2008, 2009, just basically the two of us. And then over the years, we met people who were interested in our work a lot through our e-learning connections. And a number of people have come to help us and are still on the committee now, like Lorraine, actually aren't midwives. And they've joined us and support us because of their love of learning. And that particularly warms my heart. So thank you, Lorraine, and thank you, Chris, who worked with us for so many years because of the love of learning and because of their love of supporting the midwifery community. So in terms of collaboration, again, we could talk about collaboration all day, but there's three things that have particularly struck me over the years about collaboration. And the first one is teamwork. Many hands make like work. I mean, that's an old cliche. And I've already said, I've been absolutely blown away by the generosity of the people who work with us. It is very time consuming and there is a lot of work that goes on behind us. But many hands make like work and working together, sharing ideas will make you a lot more productive and a lot more effective in the long run. The slide I've put up there, you'll see is just an example of the collaboration. You'll see two logos. And that first logo on the left was the initial logo that we started off with. And you know, this came about by I was blogging at the time and I just put up on my blog, look, we need a logo for Virtual International Day, the midwife, I've got no ideas, I'm hopeless at creative ideas like this and I'm hopeless at design. And I just put up a pose, can anyone help me? Can you not only come up with an idea but can you actually design it? I've got no money and I just put it out there. And you know, I'm embarrassed to admit I can see the lady's face, I can't remember her name. But a lovely lady, not even a midwife, an educator in New Zealand came up with this idea, did the graphic design for me. And this was all through online communication. Now I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that the logo on the right is our latest logo and I'm not quite sure how everybody got to that but it's absolutely beautiful. And I love this example of how things have changed over the years. So thank you whoever came up with them, with the ideas around that it hasn't changed in an awful lot but it's definitely beautiful and it is wonderful teamwork. So things do change. And I don't know how to put this, sometimes when you particularly are the innovator and you start off with an idea and it grows and it changes and you yourself move, I finished up and I moved on from the committee, I don't know but I think three, four, five years ago and it was very hard because this was my baby. And I felt very, on the one hand it's really weird that I actually felt, I don't want to hand over my baby. But I couldn't be present unless I learned was not to be precious about the work. It's not all about me, it's about the community. And so it was a bit of a hard lesson for me to learn when I moved on about handing over my baby. And that's life and you move on, you do other things and that's a good thing and other people take on your projects, other people take on your innovation, move it in other directions and that's healthy and that's what should happen. The other vital element of all this is evaluation. It's absolutely critical. You've got to evaluate what you're doing because if you don't, you won't know what works, what doesn't work and how to make changes and how to improve things. The second element of teamwork is about being, working together in a respectful way. Be humble, trust the people you work with and respect them. I've always believed in a very equal approach to teamwork. I think it's very difficult being, having a team in a very strict hierarchy. And again, another cliche, there is no I in team and I think that's so absolutely true. So how you work in a team is critical to its success. If you're authoritative, if you are not, if you do not engage respectfully with people, your team won't work effectively. And the third thing about teamwork is that collaboration doesn't, I'm sorry about collaboration, is that it doesn't just get the work done. It's a two-way process. You learn from each other and in our case, we became more of a community of practice I would say and it was an organic thing that's evolved over the years and because of that, I think it's been a lot more effective and a lot stronger in the way that we've worked together. These are just a few photos of the people I've met along the way who we've met virtually and then we were lucky enough to meet up face-to-face at the end Lauren, Lauren, sorry, who we've worked with now for a golly 15-odd years and what we've never actually met but it's so amazing that we still work so effectively together. So where to from here? We just pausing there to reflect. We've been through some very hard years the last three years. Excuse me, I've just dropped my notes. COVID has taught us a lot about virtual communication, collaboration and learning. And it's certainly done us a big favor. I was reflecting the other day, I was talking to someone the other day on a project that Professor Davis Debra and I worked on along the same time as we were starting up the Virtual International Day at the Midwife and it was a virtual birthing center in Second Life which was a virtual world. The project was really innovative and hugely exciting and had the potential to be incredibly successful but we were 15 I think and dead may or may not agree with me. We were 15 years ahead of our time and this goes back to being resilient again. Now if we had started that project now, I think it would fly, I think it would absolutely fly. So then that is what COVID has done for us over the last three years. It's not been easy working virtually and I have to say I think it's really good that we're getting back into face-to-face network because nothing does beat that face-to-face being together is there, there's no doubt about it. And of course acknowledge the ICM, the International Congress of Midwives, Confederation of Midwives, sorry. It has their face-to-face conference in Bali in a couple of months. So I hope that some of you will be able to get together to meet up then. And it's fascinating for me now when I think about the last 15 years that Zoom has become a verb now where it's called Zoom is an actual technology. So for the VIDM team and for educators and midwives, generally COVID has done us a huge favor. But when we look more broadly at what's going on in midwifery and the maternity world, we see a lot of problems. Certainly we're seeing it in Australia and I suspect across the world. We're seeing burnout. We're seeing people leaving both midwifery and healthcare professions. We're having difficulty in getting people coming into the professions and on it goes. We're seeing detrimental impacts on birthing because of the practices that went on through COVID and we're seeing that detrimental impact on the mental health of both midwives and the women, people and families having their babies. We're seeing the impact of medicalization of birth accelerating to such an extent that in many places 50% Caesarean section rate is normal and physiological vaginal birth is the exception rather than norm. And indeed the actual support and application of normal birth in some areas is being demonized even you may say I'm exaggeration but that's my perception of what's going on and even being shut down in some cases. So moving forward as midwives not just as midwives who want to work and be involved in the VIDM but as midwives generally across the profession we need everyone to be strong leaders who can collaborate and drive innovation. And the principles of the VIDM when we started it are just as important relevant now if not more so. And I think it's really, I mean there's lots of things that we can say that we need to move the professions forward but I think that the three critical things there's for us to think about and that is research, education and influence. It is critical for us to do research not just about women and people-centered care but we've got to think about how we disseminate it far and wide and as quickly as possible. And the VIDM does such a wonderful job in that space of helping us to disseminate information and research. We've got to think about how we turn the knowledge that we gain from research into education and again make it open access and available to everyone and I'm not just talking about midwives here that we're talking about the people, the women, pregnant women, people and families who are to space it. There are users, they're the reason why we're here in the first place. And I think one of the elements that miss so much in midwifery and healthcare generally is the influencing. We need to be able to think about who we influence and how we do it. And I think this is where we really need to grow our focus and where we need to grow our skills and awareness. We need to be able to influence what goes on at the ward level and what goes on in our everyday daily practice. We need to be able to influence policy and strategy at our organizational level and we need to influence how policy is made at national and global level. And this is where the IDM can make such a such an important part in bringing midwives together. We can give us the opportunity to network, to learn, to work together, to collaborate because the more we work together the stronger we will be to influence and change policy and ensure that we are providing women and people-centered care. It gives us opportunities for innovation to meeting people and innovate. It supports us. We can support each other through the IDM and events like this. We can support each other when times get tough and we can help each other to be resilient when we find that things are going, things are hard. We can support each other to take risks and learn and support each other to evaluate and review and to regroup if we need to. We, to be successful with our research and our education, our influence we have to work with each other in a culture of trust, respect and humbleness. And when we do these things we will see success not only in our own growth and development but also across the profession and ultimately providing effective and women-people-centered care that we provide to the women and people and families that we work with. I hope that you have a very successful and enjoyable the IDM this year and that you're able to get to all these sessions that you hope to get to and I know that we record the session so that you can get back. But I really hope that you'll think about how you can be leaders, how you can collaborate together and how you can be innovative to make sure to bring about real truths, women and people-centered care which is absolutely the key to everything we do as midwives. So thank you very much. And I'd love to have a chat with you. I think we've got probably five minutes or so. Is there any comments or questions that people would like to ask? Looks like we've got five minutes so I'll just wrap up while you're thinking of your questions, pop them in the public chat. But thank you, Sarah, for really a super drawing out of the lessons of VITM. We learned that VITM was the result of Sarah's FOMO and look where that took us 15 years on. I don't know if anybody's noticed but VITM involves no money. There's no money comes in and no money goes out. There's no sponsorship. They are absolutely committed to it being free and accessible to everybody and recognizing too that people in less well-resourced countries don't always have access to this kind of connection and sharing of information that VITM makes available. So it's fueled on generosity and goodwill and I think that's what makes it very special to me anyway. Yeah, thanks, Sarah. I love the pictures of your messy kitchen because it just highlights to me that's women's work. We're amongst it all. The messy kitchen table, the washing basket. You just make space for it, don't you, and get the work done? Just seeing if we've got any questions coming there. I love the point that you made about the wins from the hard work, you know, really stopping to celebrate those wins, walking to the top of that hill or whatever it is. And I do remember the highs after we'd run a successful VITM conference after a lot of work that the high really carried you forward into the next conference. Have you got a reflection? Just if we don't get any more questions here. On what has contributed to the longevity, Sarah, you probably, we never imagined 15 years on, we'd still be going. Look, I think it absolutely is the passion of the people involved and I think it's that, you know, and what has really, and I said that earlier about that passion, I think what has really fired that passion is the desire to provide something that is free, something that completely accessible to everybody. Acknowledging, of course, there are midwives in areas that can't access it because they don't have internet access or they don't have the technologies. And I mean, that's always been one of the problems we've had with VITM. I think COVID has certainly made technology more ubiquitous, but you can't get to everybody all the time. And that's just something that you have to accept. But I think it's the passion, the generosity of the people, not just on the organizing committee, but of the people that come to the event every year. And yeah, that just, it's such a passion to be committed to open access and free stuff and networking. Yeah, thank you. I wanted, you made a good point as well, Sarah, about stepping away and the difficulty of stepping away. And I know our own beautiful Chris Woodhouse is probably grappling with this as we speak. And, but I think there's, there has been a commitment on the committee to bring in new blood. And my reflection is that that's probably been something that's very important to the longevity of VITM. It's, as you showed, the logo is different. There have been changes, there have been improvements, there have been innovations. So it has embraced change. And I, my reflection is that's been important as well. I think the chat, there are some challenges facing VITM and I'm conscious of the time that made this quick. You know, are we all zoomed out now? And so I think the challenge for VITM now is how to harness people's knowledge of virtual engagement and what have you. But now get us re-energized, get midwives and re-energize after the last three years of being so exhausting and move us from that mindset of golly, I can hardly get to work every day. Let alone do anything outside and move us back into being enthused and motivated to share and network and do research. I think that's the big challenge. But I think that's a challenge, not just for VITM. I think that's a challenge across the professions. Linda had a question about attracting more delegates. How do we do that, Sarah? I know that's a question we often had on the committee, wasn't it? Yeah, look, it's interesting. And I'm looking at 31 users today, which is absolutely fabulous to have that number of people here, I mean, it absolutely is, but there obviously is far more people we can attract. Oh, gosh, I mean, social media, absolutely spreading your, using social media effectively is one of the keys. I don't know, I mean, I think it's really tricky, because I think, especially at MUM, because I think everybody is so tired. And I think that's a problem across the board, whatever you put on for people. They're really tired. And we've got to think about how we re-energize people, we motivate people. I don't have an answer for that one. That's a really tricky question. Yeah, it is a tricky one, but I'm sure that if the committee keep delivering such great quality sessions and such a good conference every year, it will grow as it has enormously. All right, it is time to wrap up, Sarah. So I want to thank you for your boldness and your innovations that, you know, we've really enjoyed. I hope you feel really proud of what Bidham has become and the contribution. And thank you for one of the things I didn't do very well was acknowledge your support. And I couldn't have done any of this without your tremendous support. So I'm extremely grateful to you as well, Deb. So thank you. Oh, that's super. Thank you. It's like Batman and Robin, I'll be your wingman any day, Sarah. All right, everyone, thank you. I'll let you move on to the next session. Thanks so much. It's been great. Thank you.