Looking back to when COVID-19 struck, Rosemary Burke of Sutherland can now say it was the most amazing time period of her working life, and highlight of her career.
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Ms Burke was instrumental in the successful running of the Sydney Local Health District's (SLHD) COVID-19 vaccination program, which provided more than 1.6 million vaccinations to the Australian community.
She receives The Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) - Public Service Medal in this year's Australia Day Honours for for outstanding public service in the implementation and running of the COVID-19 vaccination program and Special Health Accommodation pharmacy support for the NSW Department of Health.
Ms Burke developed models of care to ensure those people who were managed within the SLHD's Special Health Accommodation were able to access their medications, and clinicians on the ground were provided with appropriate pharmacy support.
She led NSW in the development and guidance of the preparation, management and storage of the various COVID-19 vaccines, and developed processes to efficiently draw up large quantities of prepared doses for administration within Mass Vaccination Centres, with more than 10,000 doses being prepared daily during the peak periods.
Ms Burke developed innovative processes to ensure maximum doses could be obtained from each vial of the vaccine to eliminate wastage and implemented mobile production pharmacy teams to prepare vaccines in outreach clinics in areas of need.
She has been the director of pharmacy for many years in the public hospital system, and her position is District Director of Pharmacy for Sydney Local Health District.
"I'm absolutely passionate about medication safety and how pharmacists can contribute to safer systems, and have been very involved in medication safety in digital health," Ms Burke said.
"When hotel quarantine first happened, people coming back from overseas didn't have two weeks' extra medication with them. Some were not very well - either with COVID-19 or with more complex needs, so they needed to be on lots of different medication. You have to constantly re-invent and rethink, because people were in hotel rooms not hospital beds."
Then came the vaccine roll-out - the second year of COVID-19. "RPA was one of the first vaccine systems and we also managed Camperdown and Sydney Olympic Park," Ms Burke said. "We had pop-up clinics in schools, libraries, community centres. Unlike our community pharmacy colleagues who did a lot of injecting, these were large scale system - we had 10,000 vaccinations a day at Olympic Park."
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