Ailsa Ritchie, Pioneer of Infection Control Methods, dead at 67.
SYDNEY: Ailsa Ritchie, pioneer of early intervention infection control in Australia died Tuesday at her home in Pymble, New South Wales from cancer. She was 67.
===============
Ailsa Ritchie was born in Colombo, Ceylon in 1941 and was the eldest child of Arthur Blair Stewart Richardson and Helen Richardson (née Grant).
The eldest of two children, she and the family spent her first 20 years of her life in Asia and east Asia as her father was a senior executive banker of the Midlands Bank (now HongKong and Shanghai Bank).
At the age of 18, she left the expatriate location of Ipoh, Malaysia and returned to the families ancestral home of Scotland to take up her residency and study of nursing.
She graduated with honours in nursing obstetrics, mid-wifery and community nursing . Her real love and passsion was mid-wifery and she worked as a mid-wife and community nurse in western Scotland.
Ailsa safely delivered over 1,000 babies in Scotland and was exceptionally vigilant in the care and delivery of newborns.
Her zeal and love for life culminated when she met James Ritchie, a Glaswegian Naval Architect who managed one of the docks of the once global-dominant Scottish ship builders in Glasgow.
They married in 1964 and had two children. With Scotland’s economy - and the once great global shipbuilding dominance of Glasgow declining - they decided to emigrate to Australia in the 1980’s and thus embarked upon a global emigration from small towns of Scotland to half a world away in Sydney Australia.
The family quickly established itself in Sydney. James worked at Cockatoo Island and Ailsa was quickly accepted as a senior nursing at Royal North Shore Hospital on Sydney’s North Shore.
Ailsa retrained in an entirely new and, as yet, unproven field of infection control.
In the early 1980’s the virus HIV-AIDS was discovered and infection management became one of the foremost areas of medicine and control of this previously unknown and devastating virus. Ailsa Ritchie was at the forefront of devising strategies and infection mitigation and control with some of the other leaders in that field and worked throughout the 1980’s with other members of hospitals throughout Australia.
“Ailsa was an incredibly busy person,” Patricia Cox, former friend and work colleague at Royal North Shore Hospital, said by telephone from her home in New South Wales this month. “she was also feared within the hospital, for such a small person she made people do what she wanted and needed to achieve infection control.”
She was former president of Australian Infection Control Association and wrote many papers on Infection Control Management and presented at conferences in Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
Ailsa retired in 2005 and spent her time developing her rose garden at the family home. Ailsa is survived by her husband James Ritchie, children Bruce Ritchie and Jacqueline Holden and four grandchildren.
Tags: Add new tag, AIDS, Ailsa S Ritchie, death, HIV, HIV-AIDS, jacqueline holden, jacqueline ritchie, Nursing, Obituary