ORAHS (Operational Research Applied to Health Services) 2021

Kia ora koutou,

Please find below an email from the ORAHS organisers. Note that their preferred date for completing the survey has passed, so I think if anyone interested fills it in ASAP is fine.

Noho ora mai, Mike (President, ORSNZ)

“ORAHS 2021 is on.  It will run in the week 5th -9th July 2021 entirely online and organized by Marion Penn from the University of Southampton and Sandy Rutherford from Simon Fraser University.  Please put the dates in your diary.

We were hoping that some of our family would be able to meet in person for ORAHS this year, and the decision about how to organise the conference has been delayed in the hope that it would become clear how this would work.  It is still looking uncertain/unlikely that travel will be possible so the decision has been made to have an entirely online conference.  We know that the later notice will mean some now have other plans, but hope to see as many of you as possible.

Over the last year the technology has been improving and new software has become available so we will be including time for discussion and social spaces to recreate the family feeling of the conference online as much as possible.

In order promote interactive discussion in the online format, we plan to replace some of the parallel sessions with discussion-based sessions. These would begin with 2-minute elevator talks by all of the speakers in the sessions. Each speaker would then have 30 minutes in a breakout room to expand on their talk or engage in interactive discussion. Participants would be able to choose which breakout room to attend and have the ability to switch between breakout rooms. For PhD students: the poster session – including the Steve Gallivan Award for PhD students – would be replaced by a special session in this format.

There will also be the usual small number of plenary talks by leaders in the field and a limited number of parallel sessions for 15 minute talks.

We are aiming to keep costs down and pass on the savings created by moving online.  We expect to have a cost of 20 euros for PhD students, and keep the cost as low as possible for everyone else.

It would greatly help us with budgeting (and other planning) if you could complete this short survey to let us know if you expect to be able to attend and what type of session you would like to contribute to:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfhFlpIWsvWXBL81fUZ4Jve_uk3t6AIeSTi34rFUIUguH6t4w/viewform?usp=sf_link

Please complete the survey asap, if you can before the 9th of April.

Please mail Melanie Reuter-Oppermann oppermann AT is.tu-darmstadt.de with any questions.”

ORSNZ Strategic Planning

ORSNZ is an organisation with about over 100 academic/ student/practitioner members, and is dedicated to the promotion  and support of a rather specialised mathematically oriented profession, which has seen declining activity levels and public profile in recent years, particularly outside Auckland.  ORSNZ would like to do some strategic planning on the purpose and direction of ORSNZ. The scope of work is:

      1. Facilitate a strategic conversation with ORSNZ Council and, as appropriate, other ORSNZ members on the purpose and direction of ORSNZ;
      2. Link the strategic conversation to specific actions such as brand refresh, website development, etc.

Interested parties should contact Mike O’Sullivan (President, ORSNZ, at president AT orsnz.org.nz) with any questions and to provide a plan and estimated cost for the work.