Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference 2015

By Dr Kym Jenkins, Conference convenor and Medical Director, Victorian Doctors’ Health Program

Doctors’ health, and the health of the medical profession more generally, has never been more in the news.

Through both the general media, and specialised medical publications, we have been hearing all too frequently of toxic workplaces, bullying and harassment. Stories of individual doctors who have “stuffed up”, or who are struggling, seem to make good headlines.

The Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference 2015 (adhc2015), held 22 -24 October, with its theme of “Pathways and Progress”, sought to address and redress these issues.

The conference focussed on extending the debate beyond what is wrong with our profession and just delineating the health issues we face, to a demonstration of what can be done to improve things and an examination of how individuals and organisations have overcome adversity to improve health outcomes.

The Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference is biennial event, and is an initiative of the Australasian Doctors’ Health Network. This year, the Victorian Doctors’ Health Program was proud to host the conference, and I was privileged to be its convenor.

The selection of invited speakers reflected both the breadth and depth of issues regarding wellbeing currently facing the medical profession.

Associate Professor Jan Mckenzie, a consultant psychiatrist and Associate Dean at the University of Otago, gave a moving description of how the Christchurch earthquake affected the lives of students, teachers and administrators at the University of Otago medical school.

Somehow, in the midst of the devastation, and despite the lack of electricity, a functioning IT system or functional buildings, the teaching continued. Although Jan and her colleagues live in homes that still await rebuilding, they not only support their students but have managed to produce a study with case-controlled data on the educational outcomes for Christchurch students, which has helped identify factors that have led to better outcomes.

Professor Carmelle Pesiah, Professor at the University of New South Wales, provided an entertaining (and, for some, shocking) insight into doctor aging. Professor Pesiah delivered some very strong messages and salutary warnings for us all as we get older. She emphasised that there is not just one formula for successfully aging and negotiating the approach to retirement. Aging with a little disgrace may increasingly be the norm.

Dr Hilton Koppe, a general practitioner and medical educator from Lennox Head explored what makes a career in medicine fulfilling. Dr Koppe was an innovative and engaging teacher, and his presentation encouraged people to challenge their perceptions.

On day two of the Conference, Sydney-based psychiatrist and addiction specialist Associate Professor Stephen Jurd spoke on the Doctors Recovery Movement. In a very inspirational presentation, Professor Jurd disavowed those present of any doubt that addiction is an illness. He highlighted the challenges for doctors overcoming addictions, demonstrated the power of recovery and is himself living embodiment of how much our profession will lose if we do not support for medical professionals in their recovery.

The system of mandatory reporting of impairment in doctors was the focus of a presentation from public health physician and health lawyer Dr Marie Bismark, who informed her presentation with data she has obtained from the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency.

The program of free papers, seminars and workshops throughout the two days likewise stimulated much debate, discussion and sharing of initiatives to make ourselves and our workplaces healthier.

The academic program concluded with a “Hypothetical” in which former Alfred Hospital General Counsel Bill O’Shea quizzed and challenged a team of experts about the multiple issues raised in a (not so) hypothetical case of a doctor found using propofol in the workplace.

The need to consider and look of after the individual doctor was apparent, as were the effects on the doctor’s colleagues and the workplace, and the issues of mandatory reporting.

The hypothetical demonstrated the need to take a systems view when a doctor is impaired in the workplace, and to bring together the multiple agencies involved: in this case, the general practitioner, addiction specialist, hospital administration, the Doctors’ Health Program, representatives from the doctor’s own specialist college, and the provision of support services for the colleagues – including a registrar and a medical student – traumatised after finding the doctor unconscious and apparently intoxicated.

Healthy doctors and a healthy profession – a personal reflection

By Dr Kym Jenkins, Conference convenor and Medical Director, Victorian Doctors’ Health Program

The Australasian Doctors’ Health Conference 2015 left me with three take-home messages regarding the health of doctors and the wellbeing of the medical profession. These were:

1. the importance of diversity within the medical profession. That for the medical profession to be healthy, we need not only doctors with different personality styles, but doctors from diverse cultural backgrounds and ethnicities, whatever their sexuality and gender;

2. the importance of being something or doing something other than being a doctor: what we do when we’re not practising medicine not only refreshes and rejuvenates us, but enriches us as human beings and, as a consequence, enriches us as doctors; and

3. the importance of a sense of connection. Isolation is not good for doctor health. Connections to our workplace, to our craft group, to our colleagues, to a learned College or a professional group, or to an individual such as a mentor, are all protective factors for keeping us healthy.

adhc2015 fulfilled its ambition in help make discussion about the need to keep ourselves and our profession healthy well and truly open. In 2015, taking an interest in doctor health is no longer seen as a frivolous or non-essential activity. There is an increasing body of work in this area and much more is still needed.

The next Australasian Doctors Health conference will be in in Sydney in 2017.

Reducing the impact of coaching on selection into medicine

Coaching to enter medical school first attracted research attention in 2008.1 Results indicated that just over half of those shortlisted for interview had received commercial coaching for the Undergraduate Medical and Health Sciences Admissions Test (UMAT), which is used to select interview candidates. Evidence indicates that students who had received UMAT coaching subsequently show significantly poorer academic performance throughout their medical degree compared with those who had not been coached.2 This suggests that UMAT scores achieved after coaching may not represent true ability to do medicine, or that students who rely on coaching cope less well in academic environments where coaching is not appropriate.

A study of Year 12 high school students in New South Wales and Victoria showed that coaching had no impact on the UMAT sections that assess problem solving or understanding people, but coached students had slightly higher scores on the non-verbal test of logical reasoning.3 Similar results were obtained in a New Zealand study, which involved students who had been coached by the MedEntry company.4 Even though these students believed that their UMAT performance would be improved, this belief was misplaced as their UMAT results were no better than those of uncoached students.

Last year, the University of Western Sydney altered its metric for shortlisting applicants for their Multiple Mini Interview. Subsequently, only 35.5% of those invited to interview had engaged in commercial UMAT coaching, a significant decrease from the 51.4% of interviewees who were coached in 20081 (χ² = 7.43; P = 0.003). There was no statistical difference between coached (n = 122) and uncoached (n = 222) interviewees on any of the three UMAT scores (P = 0.891, 0.885 and 0.945 for UMAT Sections 1, 2 and 3, respectively) or the Multiple Mini Interview scores (P = 0.352). Thus, the coached group were no more likely to gain entrance to the medical program. However, the coached group had higher academic university entrance ranking scores (ATAR) than their uncoached peers (mean ATAR = 98.76 v 98.01; t = 2.99; P = 0.003). Applicants who are likely to be shortlisted for interviews and yet feel the need for UMAT coaching may be less confident in their own ability or more susceptible to industry advertising — but the time and money spent on commercial coaching appears to be misdirected.

News briefs

Testing zero-gravity genomics in “vomit comet”

Nature reports that geneticists from Johns Hopkins University have successfully performed genetics experiments onboard NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft — known as the “vomit comet” — to see whether astronauts will be able to sequence their own DNA during future long-term spaceflights. “The researchers tested two key tools in zero-gravity: one might aid long-term storage of genetic material; another is a small, transportable genetic sequencer”, known as a MinION. They also tried three pipetting methods on their flights — best results came when they used a small plunger inside the pipette, which touches the sample directly, ensuring that no air gets in. “And the pipette’s tip is small enough to avoid ruining the surface tension, which would let fluid escape up the tube.” One of the researchers, Andrew Feinberg said: “I really have to give NASA huge credit in allowing us to do this”, he says. “They’re very curious people. They really want to know.”

Taking off protective clothing spreads germs

A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine shows 46% of carefully removed protective clothing still showed contamination with a fluorescent lotion used to simulate germs or other dangerous matter, The Washington Post reports. “Researchers set up a simulation that involved asking doctors, nurses and other health-care personnel at four hospitals to put on their standard gowns, gloves and masks and smear themselves with [the lotion]. After the participants carefully removed the protective equipment as they usually would the researchers searched their bodies with a black light to see whether any lotion was transferred. Both participants and researchers were surprised to find contamination in a high number — 46% — of the 435 simulations.” The researchers recommended that “educational interventions that include practice with immediate visual feedback on skin and clothing contamination can significantly reduce the risk of contamination”.

Mexico’s soda tax produces drop in sales

Two years after it was passed into law, Mexico’s so-called “soda tax” is showing solid signs of reducing sales of sweetened drinks, reports The New York Times. “Preliminary data from the Mexican government and public health researchers in the United States finds that the tax prompted a substantial increase in prices and a resulting drop in the sales of drinks sweetened with sugar, particularly among the country’s poorest consumers. The long-term effects of the policy remain uncertain, but the tax is being heralded by advocates, who say it could translate [to other countries] … It cost bottlers a peso for every litre of sugar-sweetened drinks, which amounts to about a 10% price increase, a substantial jump. Because it was applied to distributors, any resulting increase would show up on list prices.”

Patient tweets give insights into hospital experiences

A study published in The BMJ collected more than 400 000 public tweets directed at the Twitter handles of nearly 2400 hospitals in the US between 2012 and 2013, FierceHealthcare reports. “They then tagged 34 735 patient experience tweets directed at 1726 hospital-owned Twitter accounts, and broke them down by sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) and then put them into topical categories, such as time, communication and pain.” Lead researcher Jared Hawkins from Boston Children’s Hospital said: “We were able to capture what people were happy or mad about, in an unsolicited way. No-one else is looking at patient experience this way because surveys ask very targeted questions. Unsurprisingly, you get back very targeted, narrow answers.” The data are “suggestive and highlight Twitter’s possible use as a way to supplement … surveys to improve quality.”

[Correspondence] Pointing the FINGER at multimodal dementia prevention

The FINGER trial (June 6, p 2255)1 results have been highly anticipated and are of great interest to people trying to advance dementia prevention. This study delivers positive news but also raises challenging issues for the specialty. The FINGER trial combined four lifestyle-based strategies comprising about 360 intervention hours. On a composite cognitive measure, the intervention group improved by 0·23 SDs. Controls who continued standard care plus psychoeducation likewise improved by 0·19 SDs.

Car technology can make zero road toll a reality: AMA President

Advances in car safety technology mean achieving a zero road toll is now within the nation’s grasp, AMA President Professor Brian Owler has told a road safety conference.

Urging government and consumers to demand that the latest life-saving equipment be fitted as standard to all new cars, Professor Owler told the Australasian Road Safety Conference on the Gold Coast that although motorists needed to drive with greater care, the widespread adoption of proven technologies that improved car safety and mitigated human error was “the future of road safety”.

“It is the game changer that mitigates our human faults,” he said. “It is the tool we have to truly move towards zero fatalities and serious injuries on our roads.”

Earlier this year the AMA and the Australian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) jointly called for autonomous emergency braking (AEB) – in which the brakes are automatically applied if the driver fails to take action to avoid an impending collision – to be fitted to all new cars.

Evidence indicates the technology cuts the incidence of rear-end collisions by more than 38 per cent.

Professor Owler, who is the public face of New South Wales’ successful Don’t Rush road safety campaign, told the Conference that developing safer cars did not lessen the need to improve driver behaviour.

He took particular aim at what he saw as societal acceptance of risky behaviour on the roads.

“There are cultural issues, and even rites of passage, that make some young people think that speeding and disobeying the road rules is something tough, something cool or something to be admired.

“There are no survivors of road trauma who think this way.”

The AMA President said compulsory seatbelt and drink-driving laws, complemented by education and awareness campaigns, had shown that modifying driver behaviour was possible, though the process was lengthy and difficult.

And, he added, improving driver behaviour and choices did not eliminate the capacity for human error, which contributed to 90 per cent of crashes.

Professor Owler said people should not die, or endure life-long pain and impairment, because of a split-second mistake, which was why there should be widespread adoption of proven life-saving technology in cars.

Car companies are fitting AEB as standard equipment in Europe, the United States and Japan, and the AMA President said there was no reason why Australia should be left behind.

There have been objections that making AEB mandatory will increase the cost of new cars – industry estimates an additional cost of up to $200 per vehicle.

But Professor Owler said this was little price to pay for technology that would save lives, and asked why Australian life should be valued any less than one in Europe or North America.

“Australians,” he declared, “should be driving the safest vehicles on our roads”.

ANCAP aims to pressure car companies to fit AEB in Australia vehicles by making it impossible from 2018 for a car to get a five-star crash rating without the technology.

Professor Owler said consumers needed to exert similar pressure.

“The fastest way to have vehicles with these features as standard is through consumer demand,” he said, urging large fleet purchasers in particular to demand advanced life-saving equipment as standard in their vehicles.

The AMA President said it was not good enough to aim simply at reducing road fatalities and injuries.

Advances in technology meant the elimination of road trauma was a practical goal.

“There is no acceptable number of deaths, as there is no acceptable number of serious injuries,” he said. “Towards zero is not an aspirational target. For Australia, we must make zero the reality. We have the ability to do this.”

Adrian Rollins

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Good for the economy while good for your health

Prominent among the proposals for the future from Mr Turnbull as he assumes the prime ministership are ones that relate to economic growth. He seeks a more agile economy, one in which innovation is promoted and prized and where the negative forces of debt and deficit are dealt with by increasing productivity and growth. These aspirations are supported by stronger recognition in the new Cabinet of science and innovation.

Recently I have had cause to reflect on the place of health care in one piece of the Australian economy. Specifically, I was considering how much health care for the million citizens in western Sydney actually contributes to the economy. The answer is a lot. So, rather than portraying health care as a terrible drain on the national economy and incessantly saying we should cut our costs, we might express it differently.

We’re an investment, not a cost!
Our health care is based strongly on science and innovation. The revolution that has occurred in diagnostic and therapeutics due to new technology is profound. Procedures that once took days now take minutes. New drugs work wonders. CT and MRI have completely replaced the ghastly contrast-medium angiograms and pneumoencephalograms. The productivity of surgeons and other proceduralists has multiplied many times over.

So, if you are looking to grow an ‘industry’ through science and innovation, you could do no better than to look at health. It leads the way. Great efficiencies and immense amounts of suffering due to dreadful procedures have been banished by science and innovation.

In western Sydney, the health services provide care to nearly a million people. Public hospital and associated community services operate with a recurrent budget of nearly $1.4 billion per annum. That’s a lot of money pumped into the local economy. General practice likewise generates local expenditure in the millions.

Whether all this money is wisely or optimally spent is a separate and (I agree) an important question. But overlaying this concern is the fact that health care is a big contributor to the Australian economy.

What is the goal of the economy, we may ask? Surely it is to support the Australian community and enable us to compete in the world to maintain our prosperity and assist, as we see fit, to bring less-developed nations up to speed. Given that the segment of the global economy in which we compete is highly innovative and science-based, then we need to place emphasis on those attributes here Down Under.

As our future prosperity is unlikely to depend as heavily as it has in recent decades on ripping stuff out of the ground and selling it to China, inventing nothing, doing no innovation, making no scientific progress and then buying in all the creature comforts that we need from the US and Japan (and increasingly form China), we need to achieve self-sufficiency in innovation. That requires investment – in science, technology and education.

While it is hard to see these opportunities through the clouds of day-to-day slog in our hospitals and surgeries, investment in medical technological innovation, the education of smart scientists to develop even more and better equipment and drugs, the support of health research of all sorts – these things make an economy grow. These are the ways in which we develop economic agility and the nimbleness necessary to be able to adapt to change.

Health as a superior good

There is another important fact that tends to get in the way of clear perception of where health fits in the economy, and that is the complex notion that health is a superior good, something that we spend on almost without limit, constrained only by the extent of our discretionary income.

That is what makes trying to keep health costs under control so difficult. As affluence increases, ordinary goods such as food do not attract all that much additional expenditure. But health? We feel we can never get enough of it, and we are prepared as individuals and as a nation to keep on paying!

We have emerged from a period of economic discussion in Australia dominated by what many experts see to be an exaggerated concern for a relatively small deficit. The real economic challenge is the changing base of our revenue, away from minerals and coal toward service industries such as finance, education and health care. We need to be agile; we need to look for ways to increase our productivity through innovation and invention.

Health can help achieve those economic goals for the nation. Rather neatly, this can occur as a secondary outcome of our continued concentration on providing the best possible care for all Australians.

Signs workforce planning getting back on track

It’s been a chequered time for medical workforce planning in recent years.

Health Workforce Australia (HWA) was a Commonwealth statutory authority established in 2009 to deliver a national and co-ordinated approach to health workforce planning, and had started to make substantial progress toward improving medical workforce planning and coordination. It had delivered two national medical workforce reports and formed the National Medical Training Advisory Network (NMTAN) to enable a nationally coordinated medical training system.

Regrettably, before it could realise its full potential, the Government axed HWA in the 2014-15 Budget, and its functions were moved to the Health Department. This was a short-sighted decision, and it is taking time to rebuild the workforce planning capacity that was lost.

NMTAN is now the Commonwealth’s main medical workforce training advisory body, and is focusing on planning and coordination.

It includes representatives from the main stakeholder groups in medical education, training and employment. Dr Danika Thiemt, Chair of the AMA Council of Doctors in Training, sits with me as the AMA representatives on the network.

Our most recent meeting was late last month, and the discussions there make us hopeful that NMTAN is finally in a position where it can significantly lift its output, contribution and value to medical workforce planning.

In its final report, Australia’s Future Health Workforce, HWA confirmed that Australia has enough medical school places.

Instead, it recommended the focus turn to improving the capacity and distribution of the medical workforce − and encouraging future medical graduates to train in the specialties and locations where they will be needed to meet future community demands for health care.

The AMA supports this approach, but it will require robust modelling.

NMTAN is currently updating HWA modelling on the psychiatry, anaesthetic and general practice workforces. We understand that the psychiatry workforce report will be released soon. This will be an important milestone given what has gone before.

Nonetheless, it will be important to lift the number of specialties modelled significantly now that we have the basic approach in place, so that we will have timely data on imbalances across the full spectrum of specialties.

The AMA Medical Workforce Committee recently considered what NMTAN’s modelling priorities should be for 2016.

Based on its first-hand knowledge of the specialities at risk of workforce shortage and oversupply, the committee identified the following specialty areas as priorities: emergency medicine; intensive care medicine; general medicine; obstetrics and gynaecology; paediatrics; pathology and general surgery.

NMTAN is also developing some factsheets on supply and demand in each of the specialities – some of which now available from the Department of Health’s website (http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/nmtan_subc…). I encourage you to take a look.

These have the potential to give future medical graduates some of the career information they will need to choose a specialty with some assurance that there will be positions for them when they finish their training.

Australia needs to get its medical workforce planning back on track.

Let’s hope that NMTAN and the Department of Health are up to the task.

News briefs

New collaboration for NHMRC and Americans

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) reports that it has opened a joint funding round with their American counterparts, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of the United States Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Under this collaboration, the NHMRC will provide funding to support Australian researchers to participate in The BRAIN Initiative, which was announced by President Obama in 2013. “It is hoped that the research conducted through The BRAIN Initiative will lead to more effective treatments and methods of prevention for brain conditions such as dementia, autism, epilepsy, depression and Parkinson’s disease”, the NHMRC statement read. The NHMRC CEO Professor Anne Kelso said: “Both the NIH and the NHMRC believe that the ambitious goals of The BRAIN Initiative can best be attained by collaborating across both disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Over the past four decades Australian researchers have collaborated more with researchers in the US than in any other country.”

Missing microbes may point to asthma risk

NPR reports that a new study published in Science Translational Medicine shows that the composition of microbes living in babies’ guts may play a role in whether the children develop asthma later on. “The researchers sampled the microbes living in the digestive tracts of 319 babies, and followed up on the children to see if there was a relationship between their microbes and their risk for the breathing disorder … the researchers report that those who had low levels of four bacteria were more likely to develop asthma by the time they were 3 years old. To further test their theory, the researchers gave laboratory mice bred to have a condition resembling asthma in humans the four missing microbes. The intervention reduced the signs of levels of inflammation in their lungs, which is a risk factor for developing asthma.” The bacteria are from four genuses: Lachnospira, Veillonella, Faecalibacterium and Rothia.

“Predatory” journals publish 400k papers in 2014

Retraction Watch reports that a new analysis by BioMed Central shows that in 2014 so-called “predatory” open-access (OA) journals published around 420 000 papers, up from 53 000 in 2010, appearing in 8000 active journals. “Predatory” OA journals allegedly sidestep publishing standards in order to make money from article processing charges (APC). “Lately, most predatory journals are published by smaller publishers, which maintain between 10 and 99 titles”, Retraction Watch wrote. “The average APC was US$178, and most were published within 2–3 months after being submitted. Predatory journals have made the news — this year, The International Archives of Medicine was delisted from the Directory of Open Access Journals after it accepted a bogus study claiming chocolate had health benefits within 24 hours. In 2013, the same author behind that chocolate study, John Bohannon, tricked more than half of a sample of 300 OA journals to accept fake papers submitted under a fake name and institution. Last year, the Ottawa Citizen tricked a cardiology journal into publishing a paper with a garbled blend of fake cardiology, Latin grammar and missing graphs, for the price of US$1200.”

Cut and paste “tattoo” monitors health 24/7

An inexpensive wearable patch that continuously monitors vital signs for health and performance tracking has been developed by engineers in Texas, Futurity and Engadget report. The “tattoo” is manufactured via a repeatable “cut-and-paste” method that cuts production time from several days to only 20 minutes. “After producing the cut-and-pasted patches, the researchers tested them and discovered they picked up body signals that were stronger than those taken by existing medical devices, including an ECG/EKG, a tool used to assess the electrical and muscular function of the heart. The patch also conforms almost perfectly to the skin, minimising motion-induced false signals or errors. The wearable patches are so sensitive they may be worn to more easily maneuver a prosthetic hand or limb using muscle signals.”

Social network for doctors and their case photos

A new photo-sharing social network called Figure 1 is gaining popularity with doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical workers, Wired reports. “Figure 1 is educational, engaging, and privacy-obsessed.” Anyone can join, but only health care professionals can comment on photos, which, says Wired, “keeps the discourse focused and professional”. The app is also heavily moderated. An image will be blocked if it doesn’t pose some kind of medical question. The app is very careful about patient privacy. “Every time anyone uploads an image, the first thing they do is fill out a consent form. Figure 1 has an algorithm that automatically obscures faces, and tools that let the user erase any pixels containing names, dates, or any other identifying details.” Figure 1 also strips away all the metadata before the picture gets uploaded. No data collection, over 500 000 users and so far, no ads. “Some of the pictures are straight up medical oddities. But just as often, users post because they are stumped and looking for a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, nth opinion.” The app is available from the iTunes App Store, Google Play and figure1.com.

[Editorial] Ageing and health—an agenda half completed

The unprecedented increase in longevity across the world is a dividend from investment in health and progressive socioeconomic policies. It should be the source of celebration and pride; yet, the very systems that fostered longevity now risk squandering that success—and shaming themselves—because they are not aligned to the challenges and opportunities of older populations. To make healthy ageing a reality, radical changes are required in the education, organisation, and delivery of health care.

Renowned clinician next MJA Editor in Chief

Influential medical clinician and researcher, Laureate Professor Nicholas Talley, has been appointed as the new Editor in Chief of the Medical Journal of Australia.

AMPCo Board Chair Richard Allely said Professor Talley, who is currently Pro Vice Chancellor, Global Research, at the University of Newcastle and a part-time staff specialist gastroenterologist at the John Hunter Hospital, came to the position with a wealth of local and international experience in medical research, practice and publishing.

“Professor Nick Talley is a clinician, educator, writer, author, researcher, and editor, with a strong track record in medical practice, medical education, and medical publishing, in Australia and overseas,” Mr Allely said.

As well as having authored 800 original and review articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, Professor Talley is currently Co-Editor in Chief of the international journal Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics (a position he will relinquish soon after he takes up the MJA post on 1 December), and served for six years as Co-Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

“He brings significant experience, knowledge and expertise to the MJA, and is perfectly suited to guiding Australia’s leading medical journal at a time of rapid change, innovation and technological revolution in media and publishing,” Mr Allely said.

In addition to his ongoing academic, clinical and publishing work, Professor Talley is President of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Chair-elect of the College of Presidents of Medical Colleges.

He also holds several international adjunct appointments, including Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic, and Foreign Guest Professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute.

Professor Talley’s appointment was announced soon after it was revealed that AMA Federal Councillor and former Australian Medical Students’ Association President Jessica Dean had been recruited to the Board of mental health organisation beyondblue.

beyondblue Chairman Jeff Kennett said Ms Dean’s experience as a young doctor would be “invaluable” for his organisation as it sought to work with medical students and practitioners at risk of experiencing depression and anxiety.

Ms Dean has been a member of beyondblue’s Victorian Doctors’ Mental Health Advisory Group, and earlier this year addressed a meeting of senior Victorian doctors, health officials and administrators about the mental health of medical practitioners and the culture in which they work.

Adrian Rollins