Waves of financial crisis crash on Australian shores

There is no doubt that, economically, Australia is in a better position than most other countries. However, these could possibly be the most challenging times Australians have ever faced.

What if we changed the way we delivered healthcare?

A system of home-based care, facilitated by modern telecommunications and information technology, will extend the reach of our primary care health workers enabling them to monitor a patient from a distance, and, more importantly, it will allows us to scale the limited clinical specialist resources we currently have.

Wiki for Cancer

Wiki technoligy can become a new, modern, fast and cost-effective way of producing evidence based guidelines for cancer care.

Clinical practice guidelines are a useful tool for promoting evidence based medical practice. They require a complete review of the available literature and usually are written by a team of experts in a field and disseminated widely for comment. Levels of evidence range from the strongest where meta-analyses of randomised trials exist, to the weakest where there is little data but a consensus of expert opinion is recorded.

The challenges of producing such guidelines are the time and cost of their production and the rapidity at which they are outdated because of the rapid emergence of new evidence.

One potential solution is to use a Wiki platform to produce guidelines.

NT e-Health Trials: an Important Test

The creation of shared electronic records is a test that the Australian health system has yet to pass.

Indigenous health should be a very promising proving ground for e-health applications. Indigenous people have much higher rates of chronic disease and typically use wholly government-funded or government-run health facilities. Therefore, e-health has more than the usual potential to improve treatment. As well, the predominance of government health provision should mean fewer than the usual problems of coordination and interoperability of systems.

Although the federal and Northern Territory governments have both promoted e-health initiatives and, on paper, much progress seems to have been made, I suspect that the usual caveats concerning the gulf between what’s supposed to be and what’s actually happening remain in order.

New dogs, old tricks

By Greg Eatock

Little children ARE sacred, which is why the NT intervention has to stop.

The Howard government’s decision to create a blanket punitive approach to instances of child abuse in the Top End has been a disaster for Aboriginal communities throughout the Northern Territory.

Garnishing welfare payments, and returning to a system of ration cards has forced a tremendous upheaval and heartache. Not only is it degrading and humiliating for many Aboriginal people to be using the cards rather than controlling their own money, it is also forcing thousands to flee remote communities for urban settings, which were already over crowded and bereft of basic services.