The House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport will inquire into and report on long COVID and repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections, at the direction of the Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Hon Mark Butler MP. Submissions to the inquiry closed on 18 November 2022. The…

THREE months on from the release of OzSAGE’s initial advice document, the COVID-19 landscape has shifted significantly. There is both good and bad news to dissect. OzSAGE is an independent, multidisciplinary network of Australian experts from a broad range of sectors relevant to the wellbeing of the…

ON Saturday, 20 November 2021, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) experienced a devastating examination failure. Across Australia and New Zealand, 248 senior psychiatry trainees and specialist international medical graduates (SIMGs) were sitting at their home computers,…

NOW is the time for the mental health sector to “change its paradigm”, say Victorian experts welcoming the recent boost in funding. Professor Suresh Sundram, Head of the Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash University, told InSight+ that the current funding boost and drive…

IN the debate about respiratory protection for health care workers against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, occupational health and safety principles have taken a backseat. This has been most apparent in Victorian hospitals where directives for respiratory protection…

CURRENTLY in Victoria, health care workers make up more than 15% of all new cases of COVID-19, a rate much higher than the general population and higher than was seen in Italy in March 2020 at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. The risk to health care workers in this pandemic is real; globally,…

WELCOME to the last issue – no. 48! – of MJA InSight for 2017. It’s been a big year for the MJA and InSight. The Journal has a new website which has attracted more than 3.2 million pageviews, and, after the correction of a mistake in the way it was calculated, it has a new journal impact factor…

EARLIER this year, I wrote about the New South Wales Junior Medical Officer (JMO) Wellbeing and Support Forum, convened by the NSW Minister for Health Brad Hazzard on 6 June, 2017, in response to a series of well publicised suicides of doctors-in-training. This month, the NSW Ministry of Health released…

WHEN Korean Airlines Flight 801 departed Kimpo Airport in Korea on 5 August, 1997, there were 254 passengers and crew on board. The plane crashed on Nimitz Hill in Asan, Guam, while descending to land in bad weather conditions early the following morning. Two hundred and twenty-eight people died, most…

The first national study to examine the impact of COVID-19 on patients with cancer shows the importance of Australian research in examining the impacts of this disease on specific populations. To date, the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on patients with cancer in Australia, some of the…