Winning Poster at an International Conference: Our Journey
25 June 2025 | Sarah Jarvis QN and Sarah Fisher QN
In this blog Queen’s Nurses Sarah Fisher and Sarah Jarvis share their experience of winning a poster competition at an international research conference, and provide top poster creation tips for other nurses.
We are both Queen’s Nurses and met through a Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing (QICN) roundtable in 2023 on Advanced Practice within Prisons. Following this we collaborated due to our desire to support Advanced Practitioners working within health in justice settings. This was due to recognising the gaps in professional and pastoral support for Advanced Practitioners in this unique environment, which varies across the United Kingdom. We therefore set up a national Community of Practice to help address this need. This Community of Practice has been running since January 2024. We meet quarterly to provide peer supervision, review our work across the four pillars of advanced practice and have educational sessions.
We were encouraged by the QICN to submit an abstract to present our work at the 2025 International Collaboration for Community Health Nursing Research (ICCHNR) international research conference in London. We both saw this as a great opportunity to showcase and promote the work of the Community of Practice and reach potential new members. When putting the poster together we identified key areas to share about our journey: why we started the community of practice, what our members wanted, topics we have covered, distribution of our attendees across the country, and most importantly feedback from members. We wanted to show the story of how it started and what has been achieved to date.
When attending the ICCHNR conference, we had the opportunity to meet with community nurses from across the world who are actively engaged in research. It was amazing to see the diversity and range of innovations being undertaken across the globe.
We were also fortunate to meet a practitioner from Chicago who is very interested in our work and how this can be applied in their practice, as they also work with a prisoner population. Consequently, they are planning to attend one of our meetings to share the work they do in Chicago.
Our poster was not only the winning poster of the conference, but we were also selected to deliver a ‘ViPER presentation’. A ViPER presentation gives you the opportunity to succinctly talk through and expand on the poster and allows the audience to ask questions. It was a wonderful opportunity to share our experience of our journey and to see the interest that attendees had in the health in justice setting. We were very proud to present at an international conference and raise the profile of Advanced Practitioners in the UK.
Our top three tips for creating a poster are:
- Keep it vibrant and simple. You don’t want the poster to be too cluttered; use pictures and visual images to highlight key areas
- Utilise your communications teams who are amazing at reformatting designs to make sure they are scalable for print in your required size (often A1)
- Most importantly, don’t be afraid to put yourself forward and be proud of the work you are doing. We never thought our poster was going to win, but we are so pleased that we put the time and effort into putting this together and putting ourselves forward to showcase our work.
Through sharing our poster and conference attendance on social media we increased our membership to our Community of Practice by 30%. We hope that reading this has inspired you to consider how you could showcase the work you are doing. Don’t be afraid to give it a go!
Joining the Health in Justice Community of Practice
If you are an Advanced Practitioner or trainee Advanced Practitioner working within a health in justice setting and would like to join our forum please email oxl-tr.prisonacps@nhs.net
Community Nursing Research Forum
Nurses interested in finding out more about research, are encouraged to join the QICN Community Nursing Research Forum. It is completely free to join and offers a wide range of support for those at all stages of their careers.
Access our Forum resource on publishing and sharing your work here.
About Sarah and Sarah
Sarah Jarvis is a Queen’s Nurse and Advanced Practitioner working as the Clinical Lead for Substance Use within a UK prison. Sarah is currently undertaking some qualitative research looking at prisoner and prison officer experiences of access to healthcare within the prison setting. In 2024 Sarah co-founded the UK Health in Justice Advanced Practitioner Community of Practice.
Sarah Fisher is currently the professional lead for Advancing Practice in South Yorkshire. She is a Queen’s Nurse and has won awards for leadership in primary care including the Nursing in Practice – Nurse of the Year for her contribution to primary care services. In 2024 Sarah co-founded the UK Health in Justice Advanced Practitioner Community of Practice.
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