Introduction by Croakey: The importance of community and holistic healthcare will be highlighted at the Australian Society of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy (ASMIRT) conference next week.
The annual conference for radiographers, sonographers, radiation therapists, nuclear medicine practitioners and the wider medical radiation sciences community will run from 9-12 May on Larrakia Country in the Northern Territory. It is the first time the conference has been held in the Top End.
Marie McInerney, who is covering the event for the Croakey Conference News Service, previews the #ASMIRT2024 discussions below.
Bookmark our coverage here, follow the conference hashtag #ASMIRT2024, link to our conference X/Twitter List and follow @ASMIRTorg at our rotated X/Twitter account @WePublicHealth during the conference. See the full program here.
Marie McInerney writes:
Community is a “vital theme” for Top End residents, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients coming to Darwin from remote communities, according to Royal Darwin Hospital radiographer Kim Hayward.
“In the 10-15 minutes we’re spending with the patient to undertake their imaging, we can help build a rapport that will impact their journey in hospital and potentially whether or not they engage with their treatment or come back to the hospital again,” says Hayward, who is a national convenor for a major medical radiation sciences conference on Larrakia Country in Darwin next week.
“I’m a huge advocate of the role that medical radiation practitioners play in holistic healthcare and the impact we can have on a patient’s journey,” she told Croakey.

While proud of the skills that she and her colleagues have developed, one of the costs of working in Darwin, where Hayward has been for more than 20 years now, is the restricted access to professional development.
She and her colleagues “can’t just pop down the road to another comparable hospital and see how they’re doing things”. Hayward says: Our closest ‘pop down the road’ hospital is Townsville, 2,500 kilometres away.”
So Hayward tries each year to attend the annual conference hosted by at the Australian Society of Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy (ASMIRT), taking annual leave to do so.
That makes her doubly pleased that the 2024 ASMIRT conference is being held in Darwin from 9-12 May, bringing together more than 700 people from across the medical radiation sciences profession, including radiographers, sonographers, radiation therapists, and nuclear medicine practitioners.
The event is an opportunity for Hayward and her local colleagues to meet with practitioners from across the country and internationally, to exchange information, research and practice skills across clinical, technological, research and workforce issues.
Unique environment
This year’s conference will have a particular focus on Top End issues and expertise, “a Darwin flavour” that also highlights the unique environment that Northern Territory medical radiation practitioners operate in and the expertise and responses they have developed.
“This is the first time ASMIRT has brought the conference to the Top End, so we wanted to do something a little bit different, to highlight why working here is unique for our profession,” Hayward said.
At the heart of that difference is climate, remoteness, a unique health demographic with a large and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, and the role Darwin plays as a hub for Asia Pacific disaster/emergency medicine and for regional outreach.
The three-day conference has been brought together by Hayward, fellow conference convenor NT Health radiographer Bec Kilday and ASMIRT under the theme, Colours of Country: Community, Resilience, and Innovation.
The opening plenary will focus on disaster healthcare and the work of the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre (NCCTRC) in Darwin, which leads Australian health responses to incidents of local, national and international significance.
That has included deploying Australian Medical Assistance Team (AUSMAT) capability to a host of emergencies over the past 15 years, including the White Island volcano eruption in New Zealand, a trachoma outbreak in the remote NT community of Maningrida, and to the 2018 Papua New Guinea earthquake.
As well as offering a site visit to the NCCTRC, the conference will hear from paramedic and NCCTRC Director Abigail Trewin and former Royal Darwin Hospital radiographer Tom Randall, a specialist in in trauma and emergency imaging, speaking on an AUSMAT radiographer’s experience, ‘From typhoons to measles’.
Hayward says the opening session “will set the tone for the conference, that things here are a little bit different, that the work we do is exciting and that we’re presented with unique challenges on a daily and weekly basis”.
That includes regular presentations of diseases that would be somewhat “extraordinary” to see in other parts of Australia, including tuberculosis (TB) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD), which are comparatively prevalent in the Top End, an ongoing concern for the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and regionally.
The conference will hear about innovations in the detection of RHD and presentations on TB globally and locally.

Focus on community
Two sessions are to be led by presentations from Professor Gail Garvey, a proud Goori woman from New South Wales and former long-term Darwin resident, who is a leading researcher on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and cancer.
She will present on the 4Cs program: Communication and Collaboration in Cancer Care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and moderate a panel discussion including Alan Walker Cancer Centre Aboriginal Liaison Officer Philip Mayo and a patient.
Garvey was recently involved in hosting the World Indigenous Cancer Conference, which Croakey covered: see here.
The conference focus on community will also apply to the broader region, including issues and capacity-building for close neighbours like Timor Leste and Australia’s role and responsibility as a regional health and economic leader.
Each of the three themes have crossover of course, but the second theme, ‘resilience’, also applies to workforce pressures, particularly in remote areas where there is no medical imaging degree offered at the local university and health agencies are forced to recruit from other parts of Australia.
As a result, teams are “often running well below our FTE”, prompting a full session to look at workforce and workplace resilience, including ‘an introduction to impostor phenomenon’ from United Kingdom radiographer and sonographer Associate Professor Gill Harrison.
Advances in technology
As at last year’s conference, the innovation theme also speaks to the rapid evolution of the profession and its technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) which can seem in contradiction to perspectives on community and resilience, Hayward said.
“At a conference like this it’s really important that we talk about those advances and innovations in our profession and how we can embrace the technology without it being at the expense of the human side.
That’s a key interest for fellow Darwin-based convenors Elly Keating and Kiara Spadavecchia, both radiation therapists, who are also excited at the opportunity to showcase local issues and skills, saying it’s a morale booster to be able to fill the program with so much local expertise.
They are keen to hear about how other regional and remote therapists work, particularly as more smaller radiation therapy centres are being earmarked and established across Australia through the Federal Government’s Radiation Oncology Health Program Grants Scheme.
“I’m hoping to hear about the regional and rural delivery of RT [radiation therapy]: what other centres are doing, the trend to smaller centres, the push to make RT more accessible, to hear how they are managing AI etc,” Keating said.
Hayward said the conference will also seek to make sure that nuclear medicine is not “the forgotten sibling”, including through a site visit to the Cyclotron at Royal Darwin Hospital.
The most powerful of its kind in Australia, the Cyclotron means that, for the first time, radioisotopes are now produced locally in the NT, enabling faster diagnosis and treatment, and meaning Territorians no longer have to travel interstate for PET (positron emission tomography) scans to assess cancers, and neurological and cardiovascular diseases.
It was a significant medical advance for the NT, particularly in the wake of COVID-19, which disrupted the supply of isotopes from southern states, leaving patients potentially unable to access PET scans.
But it is landmark in other ways – the $27 million Cyclotron topped the 2022 NT Architecture Awards, hailed for a “humble and somewhat nondescript building (that) houses a labyrinth of extraordinarily complex uses”.
Sustainability
The conference will also focus on climate and health, with a session on healthcare, environment and sustainability that will feature efforts to improve the difficult physical environment of the Royal Darwin Hospital campus, which was, incredibly, modelled on the Royal Canberra Hospital, right down, some have it, to the snow shutters on the windows.
One of the speakers, Royal Darwin Hospital specialist emergency physician Dr Mark de Souza, has recently reported that the NT Health workforce is working under “colliding operational pressures worsened by extreme weather events, regional staff shortages and infrastructure that is poorly adapted to climate change”.
He has led work on the H3 Project (Healthy Patients, Workforce and Environment), which explores nature-based interventions in the NT health sector, providing a “platform for improving cultural safety and hospital health outcomes for First Nations Australians, while promoting Indigenous knowledge and leadership in climate adaptation and mitigation efforts in the healthcare system”.
See Croakey’s earlier reports on the the Greening Royal Darwin Hospital project that had planted 950 local native Australian trees and shrubs, half of which were culturally significant species identified by Larrakia plant experts.
Other key presentations at #ASMIRT2024 include sessions on neurodiversity and gender diversity in medical radiation practice and a workshop session titled ‘Surviving Death’ by Sunshine Coast radiation oncologist and author Dr Colin Dicks, based on his book ‘Death, Dying and Donuts’.
Challenging professional landscape
Croakey’s preview of last year’s ASMIRT conference noted it was taking place amid a challenging professional landscape, with increasing demand, growing waiting times, the need for more complex imaging, calls for a new stream of research, scope of practice issues, and worries about recruitment and retention, with graduate numbers way down.
ASMIRT president Carolyn Heyes said much of that challenge remains, with a continuing chronic workforce shortage of all medical radiation professionals, particularly nuclear medicine and radiation therapy although gaps in diagnostic fields are closing.
The biggest issue now, she said, is for universities with growing numbers of students to be able to access clinical placements in overworked and understaffed clinics.
“It’s a bit of a ‘chicken or egg’ situation: if we are fully staffed, we can take on more students, but we won’t all be fully staffed until these students graduate or we get more people from overseas,” she said.
Ahead of a ‘future of the profession’ closing panel session, the conference will hear from key United Kingdom speaker, Dr Rachel Harris, on the development, provision, and regulation of hospital-based radiography ‘apprenticeships’ in the UK that could help address these issues in Australia.
Importantly, students are “paid from day one”, an added attraction for mature age students, she said.
The conference will also consider other professional issues, including advanced practice and role extension, and ongoing discussions about authority for radiographers to be able to ‘comment’, in the absence of radiologists, on clinically significant image findings.
Heyes is also keen for delegates to attend sessions on AI, to allay fears. “AI will make our jobs easier, it’s not going to take our jobs away,” she said.
Beyond that, she said, it is exciting to have the conference in Darwin, the first in the NT since it was held in Alice Springs in 1997.
“I think it’s going to be a real eye opener for a lot of people.”

Follow the conference news on X/Twitter at #ASMIRT2024 and via this X/Twitter list of presenters and participants.