Thea Briggen Tiqui

Clinical Nurse Specialist, Infectious Diseases

Public Health Unit

“As a Clinical Nurse Specialist, I am part of the infectious diseases team, managing communicable disease cases that need following up, and we support managing outbreaks in hospitals, aged care facilities and child care centres.

I’m from the Philippines, where there are limited resources, so I started getting interested in the preventative side of health. I wanted to prevent the disease before it can infect other people, by providing education, ensuring people get the right advice, what to do if they’ve got symptoms, and then how to control the spread of infection in the community.

Every time I go to the Philippines I do some education. If they ask me to present or provide education and share what I know about a particular disease, I do some talks.

Our one rule here in the Public Health Unit is not to mention the Q word (quiet), otherwise it always happens that you get back-to-back complex calls. I think it’s just one of those things. It’s always busy.”