Upskilling GPs with the support of paediatricians could reduce the number of children referred onto lengthy public hospital waiting lists, a new study has found.
Despite reductions in consumption, particularly among young people, Australia has seen a rise in alcohol-related harms and avoidable costs. To decrease alcohol’s enormous burden on individuals, families and communities, it is important that all drinkers ease their alcohol consumption, not just heavy drinkers and other risk groups.
People may take up or drop exercise habits during the life course, but these long-term patterns of activity may be associated with different risks of early death.
Despite ongoing efforts to improve the communication of medicines information across the health system, medication errors at transitions of care persist. Each year in Australia, 250 000 hospital admissions are due to medication-related errors, costing our healthcare system an estimated $1.4 billion. More than half of medication errors occur at transitions of care.
The launch of Australia’s National Lung Cancer Screening Program (NLCSP) is a step forward in preventive healthcare — but screening thousands of high-risk Australians with low-dose CT scans will inevitably uncover a far greater number of people with undiagnosed chronic respiratory disease, particularly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Australia’s health and medical research sector is a global leader in innovation and discovery. Yet, a hidden ethical problem in how research grants are funded threatens to undermine this reputation and the researchers it relies on.
Why is it that different states and territories have different policies on meningococcal B vaccination?
For almost two decades, the Australian Medical Association’s Public Hospital Report Card has tracked the health of our public hospital system, and in the past four years, dedicated mental health editions of the report have highlighted the unique challenges patients face when accessing mental healthcare in public hospitals.
The consultation room has a new participant. It arrives when patients pull up ChatGPT-generated symptom analyses. It appears when we use GenAI to check drug interactions or draft letters. And it's always listening when ambient AI scribes document our conversations. Whether acknowledged or not, GenAI is fundamentally changing what happens in the consultation room.
