BRF Update Jan 2020
A belated Happy New Year to you all. I hope you all got some opportunity to rest and catch up with important people in your life and I would like to thank the members of the BRF team who had to come in to ensure all was well with the animals over the end of year shutdown period. There is a lot happening already, so please see a number of important updates as follows:
HEW 5 senior animal technical officer role
In 2019 we experienced unprecedented demand for technical services – a 50% increase, performing an average of 174 hours of services per month. To assist the research coordinator with managing the continued influx of requests and correspondence due to this increased demand, and also to provide progression and recognition opportunities for the fantastic technicians working within UQBR we are recruiting for a HEW 5 senior animal technical officer – this job posting closes tonight. I have attached the advertisement – note that this is only open to UQ staff. We will send through notification of the outcome once it is available and will be happy to discuss any queries in regards to this new role.
Weekend shifts/services
We are currently in the position whereby our team are working weekend shifts quite frequently and the shifts are quite long, partly due to the above noted increase in demand for technical services, some of which fall on the weekend. We will be reducing the timeslot available for weekends on PPMS to just 2 x 30min bookings to try and limit bookings to only those that are critical and feasible for our team to perform. We welcome any feedback on whether this working and how best to improve this, as the current situation is a significant burnout risk for the team.
Mandatory Annual Reports
The deadline for animal ethics MARs is approaching – it is essential that you follow the attached guidelines and following instructions. UQBR will be generating the MARs due to the current processes ongoing as part of the new database implementation – please email [email protected] with your approval number to obtain your report, please note that this may take some time to be completed. DO NOT try and run any reports prior to 3.30pm on any given day as unfortunately the old database is likely to crash and this stops work across UQ animal facilities.
Special food/bedding/water changes to be cost-recovered
As notified in July of last year, time spent on special (non-standard) food, water and bedding changes for animals will be cost recovered as of January 2020. These services currently already require a technical booking, the only difference will be that these bookings will no longer be manually changed to zero costs on the monthly bill – rather, they will be charged at the standard $55/hr as per all of our other services.
https://www.tri.edu.au/brf-update-july-2019
Spare NSG animals
We have a lab with 25 spare NSG animals that were born in May-July 2019 that can no longer be utilised. If anyone is interested in utilising these mice and has/can get the appropriate ethics approval please contact [email protected] ASAP.
Animal order form – ARC/ABR
The UQBR central team are still experiencing problems with animal orders, with errors being made on the forms – please see attached email with instructions on how to do this correctly.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact us with any queries or concerns.
