This year’s International Women’s Day theme “Count Her In: Investment in Women. Accelerate Progress” is about examining the pathways to greater economic inclusion for women and girls everywhere. For women in medicine, this year’s theme is poignant. Although there have been strides in advancing…

As 2023 comes to a close, so too does our first year bringing you InSight+ every week. It’s been a challenging year, but also a rewarding one, as the InSight+ team worked hard to bring you the latest medical news and expert opinion with each issue. Before we head off on a well earned holiday, we wanted…

The difference between working in general practice and working in emergency shows just how difficult it is for clinicians to provide continuity of care in a hospital environment, writes Dr Jillann Farmer. Those of you who take an interest in the brief biography at the and of my articles will have noticed…

Analysis of emergency department data has dispelled the myth that many people attending emergency rooms should have been seen by GPs. Experts say the actual reasons are much more complex. According to research published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, many people presenting at emergency departments…

Medicine can survive in the post-truth world, but we must pay much more attention to factors beyond the scientific facts, writes Dr Jillann Farmer. In 2014, West Africa experienced the worst Ebola virus disease outbreak in history. The previous peak of cases and deaths had been an outbreak in Uganda…

The latest Medical Training Survey makes for sobering reading, prompting the need for senior doctors to do more to address bullying and racism in the profession, writes Dr Jillann Farmer. The results of the 2022 Medical Training Survey are in – and the story is not pretty for our early-career colleagues.…

How do we maintain equitable healthcare without blowing the bank? Our primary care system is the key, writes Jillann Farmer ... In my first year of general practice, a patient I had seen a couple of hours earlier requested a home visit. When I called to see what was wrong, she told me she had left her…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the health system stretched and stretched and stretched. So did the people in it. We must resist the inevitable urge of funders and policy makers to assess that this was the true system capacity all along, writes Jillann Farmer ... THE first article I wrote for InSight+…

I AM not ashamed to say that huge swathes of 2022 have completely baffled me. Welcome to the last issue of InSight+ for the year, by the way. We’ve had a cracking year, with our readership growing by about 40% on 2021 by user numbers, and our articles being clicked on just shy of 895 000 times in…

“The fundamental problem … in the overall approach to primary care interventions is that they have focused on individual entities – doctors and their prescribing, pharmacists and their dispensing, private hospitals and their medication management. However, nobody has yet bitten off the enormous…

A robust system would protect those of us who do the right thing, and a transparent, fair system would take a lot of the stress out of an honest day’s work. That’s going to take time, and it cannot be an excuse for continued expectations that doctors carry the burden of implementing unannounced…

“My plea to the younger generation of doctors, men and women, is that you not be complicit by silence when you see inequity, harassment, abuse and discrimination at play. Do not be tempted to benefit from it, and be brave enough to call it when you see it. Power will not change of its own volition,…

This is not about money or profit or turf. It’s about making sure that we do not conduct experiments – such as the North Queensland Pharmacy Trial – that could have life-long consequences. IN the 1990s, I worked for the Medical Board of Queensland. There was an occasion when a matter that I was…

GPs are the least likely to have large gap payments, but the most likely to be under-remunerated by Medicare for their work.  We need to take a long, hard look at why a GP spending 40+ minutes on assessing and designing a management plan for a patient under a Mental Health Care Plan has a scheduled…

Let me be clear, we do not yet have a complete understanding of the long term sequelae of COVID, but a picture is emerging that makes a policy of mass infection grossly irresponsible. It’s time for our medical leaders to give strong and assertive advice to politicians, to leave them no plausible deniability,…

AN abiding childhood love for The Phantom took Queensland GP Dr Jillann Farmer to the top of world as Medical Director of the United Nations, but, she says, it is general practice that continues to “feed my soul”. Dr Farmer served with the UN from 2012 until mid-2020, responsible for not only the…

CREATIVITY and medicine don’t always go hand in hand, but the events in recent years have shown the world that health care is a highly adaptable space and health care professionals are full of ideas on how to get things done when an overhaul of traditional practices is needed. One group of particularly…