25/11/19-29/11/19
Here we are, hurtling towards the end of November, and yet there is still so much to pack in before we get to the end of the year! We have big plans for December, so keep your eyes peeled.
This week in the news….
#Medevac is amping up, with the Senate set to debate the government’s bid to repeal medevac laws passed in February. Australian doctors have come out in full force to support the medical transfers of refugees (not for the first time), with more than 5000 doctors signing an open letter to Jacqui Lambie urging her to support Medevac. You can read about experiences of refugees who have been transferred to Australia for medical treatment here.
Melbourne’s thunderstorm asthma outbreak in 2016 resulted in over 8000 hospital admissions, but CSIRO’s Data61 and UNSW Sydney’s Kirby Institute have been working on a method of early detection of acute disease events using Twitter. They have been working on refining a monitoring algorithm to provide early alerts for acute disease events, which could in future be used to detect other outbreaks. You can read their paper here, and a brief outline of what it all means (for the non-tech-minded of us) here.
The Grattan Institute has published a controversial report on methods to reduce private health insurance premiums, pointing the finger at inefficiencies in private hospitals and “a handful of 'greedy' doctors.” This is part of much broader extensive negotiations between private health insurers, private hospitals, and doctors, that have resurfaced recently in part due to proposals to make surgeons’ fees and private health insurance and medicare rebates publicly available.
NSW Health Pathology, eHealth NSW and Microsoft are trialling “point-of-care” devices at 6 NSW public hospitals. These devices would ideally enable test results and clinical observations to be uploaded and transmitted to treating clinicians without having to negotiate with patchy wi-fi in rural areas. Evaluation of the project will begin in December, so we’ll keep you posted!
The 2020 Sydney International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare is now calling for forum posters. Partnered this year with the Clinical Excellence Commission, this forum is a biannual collaboration between the British Medical Journal and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The forum aims to connect healthcare professionals from over 35 countries over improvement and safety projects. The poster topics for this year are:
Safety
Quality, Cost, Value
Person and Family-Centred Care
Population and Public Health
Building Capability and Leadership
Improvement Methods
Work In Progress
You can find more information here, and register, with the CEC here.
The Interim Report for the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System is now available, containing a number of priority recommendations which you can find here. One of the recommendations which is particularly relevant to the GP Living Library is to establish a “residential mental health service, as an alternative to an acute admission, designed and delivered by people with lived experience of mental illness”. The impact that lived experience can have on the way a person builds their perspective and their approach is something profound that we at GPLL believe should be more recognised and more utilised, and I’m personally grateful to see its recognition in this recommendation. This is the first of two reports, the second of which is due in October 2020.
The Interim Report also recommends “the creation of an Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing Centre, and an expansion of Aboriginal social and emotional wellbeing teams across the state”. This recommendation sounded familiar in a way I could not pinpoint until I realised I had seen a similar mission statement recently from the practice of one of our own human books. Dr. Nadeem Siddiqui is the Executive Director of Clinical Services at Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service in Canberra, an Aboriginal community controlled primary healthcare service. They offer a broad range of services in order to address often-complex needs, and I feel privileged that in my research for Dr. Siddiqui’s bio, I had the opportunity to stumble upon a project driven by such a deep sense of duty to community.
This week’s spotlight is a little more global - the winning poster at this year’s Leaders in Healthcare 2019 Conference was an examination on the diversity of health leaders and whether this has changed over time. The team behind the poster launched the project almost completely virtually, and although they still have a little work to do before it’s a complete and publishable study I have no doubt that their study design will be a useful metric to examine our own health culture in the future.
This week was International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which doubles as the beginning of 16 days of Activism. I appreciate the efforts of the Global 16 Days Campaign in particular because it acknowledges the unique difficulties that are faced by different women in different communities; often global initiatives can ignore the specific needs of certain people or communities (particularly trans women, gender non-conforming women, women with disabilities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women) and in an effort to unify people they can subsume those needs. The 16 Days and #RatifyILO190 campaign identifies the importance of grassroots approaches as well as a global approach, which means that individual communities have more opportunity to have their voices heard. It particularly acknowledges the specific needs and vulnerabilities of those working in health, emergency services, and social services.
Coming up next week…
Next week marks the beginning of the end of the year - doubtless many of you will be taking on a surge of last-minute patients and urgent bookings. I should have a few extra opinion pieces available in the coming weeks just to give you a break from it all! If you’re involved in any of the above projects and you’d like to send an opinion piece through, you’re more than welcome to email me at gp.living.library@gmail.com. See you next week!