Clinical complications suffered by patients during hospital stays are assumed to be preventable and to provide some metric of quality of care. To assist in their understanding and mitigation the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare established a national programme to track hospital-acquired complications (HACs) in a formalised way. Comparison data can be found through the Health Roundtable reports and it’s been understood that hospitals with higher complication rates may hav...
Nov 16, 2022•39 min•Ep. 88
About two thirds of Australians use complementary and alternative medicines but only around half of these people will mention it to their doctor. Patients in palliative care settings may be more inclined than most to try therapies from outside the box. But they are also more vulnerable to side effects and interactions given that their drug metabolism and clearance mechanisms are often impaired. In this podcast you’ll hear the authors of a Clinical Perspectives article titled " Complementary and ...
Oct 25, 2022•44 min•Ep. 87
This is the first episode of a new format called “IMJ On-Air” inspired by the RACP’s Internal Medicine Journal. Each episode will be have as guest-host a section editor or reviewer of the IMJ interviewing authors of a recent article. Often these will be Clinical Perspectives reviews which summarise the latest in management of major medical disorders. In this episode we have leading respiratory physicians from the Royal Melbourne Hospital presenting current best practice in the diagnosis and trea...
Sep 13, 2022•47 min•Ep. 86
The National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia aspires to streamline referral pathways so that children can get the right help as early as possible. But despite the best intentions of many clinicians, there are drivers in the health system that make implementation difficult. There are constraints in the way specialists can be reimbursed for time spent managing a case through the diagnostic process. And the extent of developmental disorders in th...
Aug 31, 2022•41 min•Ep. 85
The average age at which autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed four, though signs are often present well before that. Even where families and GPs may have concerns early in a child’s development, it can take a year or more for a consult with a paediatrician to become available. There are similar waiting lists to see other allied health and sub-specialists who may contribute opinions to a diagnosis. And there is some inconsistency as to what kind of supporting documentation is required to access ...
Aug 16, 2022•40 min•Ep. 84
In the last episode we heard some powerful examples of the challenges faced by some practitioners in medicine. Every situation has its idiosyncrasies, but most people start out with a passion for what they’re doing. In today’s podcast we hear from doctor-career coaches Ashe Coxon and Sarah Dalton who help medics solve the workplace challenges, and remember what drew them to the profession. Associate Professor Peter Connaughton describes burnout as an occupational health issue, that needs to be s...
Jul 11, 2022•42 min•Ep. 83
Not a day goes by that there isn’t a headline about the overstretched health service and the struggling professionals within it. It isn’t COVID that has created this situation. The pandemic was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. At the RACP Congress in May, ENT surgeon Eric Levi explained why burnout should be considered not as a mental health condition but as an occupational disorder. And apart from the stressors of the job itself and the work relationships, the medical profession has ...
Jun 21, 2022•49 min•Ep. 82
In episode 78 we heard from some physicians who found themselves taking up the role of advocate, not just for their own patients but for broader system change. And health policy lobbyist Patrick Tobin explained how physicians and the College as whole can best get the attention of parliamentarians. For example, the RACP’s Healthy Climate Futures campaign calls on Government to make the healthcare system more resilient against the shocks of climate heating and extreme weather events. To complete t...
Jun 03, 2022•20 min•Ep. 81
The globe has already warmed by more than one degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels and is on track to exceed two degrees by the end of the century. It doesn’t sound like a lot but this will have profound effects on human health with Australia being particularly vulnerable. Most obviously, Australia’s biggest cities will become furnaces in summer with a more than doubling of heat-related mortality. The rising temperatures will also increase frequency of the climate oscillations that delivere...
May 02, 2022•33 min•Ep. 80
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionised care for patients with advanced melanoma and other cancers. These days around half of patients with unresectable metastatic melanoma can expect to live to five years after a regime of agents such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab. That’s up to ten times the survival rate of patients a decade ago, when the chaemotherapy Dacarbazine was the front-line treatment. Over half of these patients who respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors will go on to survi...
Mar 29, 2022•47 min•Ep. 79
The core work of being a physician is demanding enough. But if you’re seeing patients come in day after day with ailments that have social determinants behind them, you may start to feel like Sisyphus; heaving that boulder up the hill only to have to start from the bottom every time it slips your grasp. Surely it would be better to change those socioeconomic drivers but where do you even begin? In fact, the three word mission statement of the RACP is Educate - Advocate – Innovate. In this podcas...
Mar 02, 2022•39 min•Ep. 78
This episode is shared from the Essential Ethics podcast produced at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. It is presented by paediatric respiratory physician John Massie and clinical ethicist Lynn Gillam who are respectively the Clinical Lead and Academic Director of the Children's Bioethics Centre. In a series titled “Deciding with Children” they raise the following questions. When can a child be considered to have autonomy to make healthcare decisions for themselves? What intrinsic righ...
Jan 11, 2022•46 min•Ep. 77
This is the third podcast in a series about medical injury. First we talked about what victims of injury want to hear from the health system after such an event. And then we discussed the guilt and compromised professional identity that doctors might feel when they’ve been involved in a patient harm. We also heard how fear of medicolegal suits is a major obstacle to greater transparency. At least that’s the case in Australia, where litigation is virtually the only way for victims to get financia...
Dec 07, 2021•40 min•Ep. 76
In the last episode we talked about what patients or their families want to hear after a iatrogenic injury. Despite best practice standards for open disclosure, this occurs far less often that it should. The reluctance from health practitioners to be more transparent is in part due to a misplaced fear of exposure to liability, but perhaps the greatest barrier to incident disclosure is culture of medicine itself. The historic tropes of the infallible physician and the heroic surgeon are still str...
Nov 09, 2021•51 min•Ep. 75
Medical injury occurs at a rate of about 12 per cent of admissions, and errors without consequence at a higher rate still. According to Australian and New Zealand guidance documents, disclosure of error “is a patient right, anchored in professional ethics, considered good clinical practice, and is part of the care continuum.” But many practitioners are fearful of the medicolegal consequences of disclosure, or unsure about how to present the details of a challenging episode in care. In this podca...
Oct 22, 2021•46 min•Ep. 74
There are many layers of public health interventions that can reduce the rate of transmission of the novel coronavirus. Social distancing, mask wearing, lockdowns and vaccines each nudge the reproduction number down. But you need all of them working together to make a significant impact, and that means you need the community on board. In this podcast we discuss the challenges and strategies around communicating public health messages to the public during a time of such high anxiety. Jessica Kauf...
Sep 23, 2021•49 min•Ep. 73
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to public attention, like never before, the work of public health physicians as well as epidemiologists, statisticians and computer modelers. The crisis also shown how hard it is to take decisions affecting the lives of millions when there is so little evidence to go on. Models of viral spread and interventions to mitigate these have become everyday discussion points, but few people understand how hard these are to put together. In this podcast we share expert t...
Sep 15, 2021•57 min•Ep. 72
In 2017, Victoria was the first state in Australia to pass voluntary assisted legislation and has been followed by Western Australia, Tasmania and now South Australia. Aotearoa-New Zealand passed its End-of-life Choice Bill two years ago and that will go live in November. This podcast draws on the experience of some very committed Victorian clinicians who share the lessons they've learned over the last two years about practical implementation of VAD. The presenters were recorded at this year’s R...
Jul 20, 2021•47 min•Ep. 71
Acute Kidney Injury makes a greater contribution to early mortality than acute myocardial infarction and it's been argued we should consider the concept of “kidney attack” to give it the weight that it deserves. But the presentation of kidney injury isn’t as overt or timely as a heart attack often is. While serum creatinine is a pretty good reporter of chronic impairment in kidney function it’s very insensitive to acute injury, so for two decades there’s been a concerted search for more proximal...
Jun 10, 2021•43 min•Ep. 70
This is the third and final part of our series on gendered medicine. We step back and look at the way that health care and research are funded. It’s been said that the health needs of women are undervalued by our existing fee-for-service model, down to individual item numbers in the Medicare Benefits Schedule. There’s also evidence that disease predominantly experienced by female patients receive less research investment. Is this blatant sexism or a symptom of other structural imbalance? And wha...
Apr 15, 2021•44 min•Ep. 69
Gender can be considered a social determinant of health, in the different pressures and expectations it puts on women and men. For example, the taboos around menstruation are so profound that many young women are dangerously naïve about their own reproductive health. Meanwhile, endometriosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other conditions associated with chronic pain have a stigma around them that means self-reports are often not taken seriously by health professionals. Historic notions of hyste...
Mar 22, 2021•50 min•Ep. 68
This is the fourth and final part in our series on Global Health Security. Australia’s Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security was launched in 2017 to provide development assistance to health services as far-flung as Fiji, Cambodia and Timor L’este. Its mission is always tailored to the needs of the partner government. In Indonesia it has provided training to the veterinary sector to foster antimicrobial stewardship. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was a sudden shock to the development agenda and has...
Jan 31, 2021•44 min•Ep. 67
We traditionally think of cardiovascular disease as a man’s problem, but it’s the leading cause of death for women as well as men in most of the industrialized world. Despite great advances in the management of heart disease in recent years, women are still not getting the same quality of care as men. Readmissions and mortality following an acute myocardial infarction at least two times higher in women as they are in men. Put simply, cardiovascular disease is better understood in men, the presen...
Jan 17, 2021•41 min•Ep. 66
In this episode we present some provocative solutions to problems presented in the previous two stories.We heard about pharmaceutical patents, and how embedded intellectual property law is in global trade relations. There’s this fundamental assumption that innovation occurs thanks only to the vigour of the private sector and the plucky entrepreneur. It’s even been said that financialized capitalism is “ the greatest engine of progress ever seen .” But the reality is that shiny smartphones and ta...
Nov 12, 2020•42 min•Ep. 65
This is part 2 in our series on global public health and focuses on the impact of intellectual property laws on the development and distribution of pharmaceuticals. The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a frenzy of vaccine development never seen before, but also examples of hoarding, price hikes and vaccine nationalism. The crisis has brought together scores of governments, manufactures and philanthropic organisations to pool research outcomes and patents, but the response from big pharma has bee...
Nov 03, 2020•45 min•Ep. 64
During the COVID-19 crisis there has been some criticism of the World Health Organisation as to whether it declared a pandemic soon enough or covered up for China’s failings. But few commentators have explained the role and responsibilities it shares with its member states in dealing with a pandemic. A prototype of the International Health Regulations were conceived during the cholera epidemics of the mid 1800s, and but the most current version of the IHR was formalised in 2005 in response to SA...
Oct 06, 2020•41 min•Ep. 63
In episode 59 we shared a sampler of the Essential Ethics podcast from the Children's Bioethics Centre , at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. A couple of cases studies were presented to help us define “the Zone of Parental Discretion” – a space in which decision-making about a child’s medical care is conceded to parents even if it’s not optimal clinical management. Today’s thought experiments come from the oncology department. First, we’re asked to consider when an adolescent should be p...
Aug 11, 2020•42 min•Ep. 62
In the previous episode we discussed the presentations and screening of delirium, as well as the risk factors. Just as important as these medical and iatrogenic precipitants are a host of environmental triggers that are highly modifiable. Anything that contributes to a person’s disorientation and discomfort can increase the likelihood of a delirium episode. While a lot of these factors are compounded in elderly and frail patients, it’s important not to be fatalistic. Delirium can be reversed in ...
Jul 09, 2020•34 min•Ep. 61
Delirium is associated with an increased risk of falls, dementia and high dependency care, and all of this adds up to higher mortality. About a third of patients admitted to ICU or approaching the end of life experience delirium. But it’s notoriously underdiagnosed, so in this episode we talk about the presentations and detection of delirium. We also go through some of the medical risk factors, including dementia, infection and metabolic disorders like hypercalcaemia. But even more common than t...
Jul 08, 2020•32 min•Ep. 60
The ethical questions that come up in paediatrics can appear overwhelming to begin with. When can a child be said to have cognitive capacity and bodily autonomy? For those who don’t, where does the guardianship of the parent to give way to that of the medical professionals? When might treating one child have implications for the resources available to others? And what about not treating or vaccinating a child, if that’s what the parents want? All of these issues are tackled in the Essential Ethi...
Jun 15, 2020•35 min•Ep. 59
