October 23, 2009 – 9:20 am
Years ago, I wrote a story about the use of music in operating theatres to create the right ambience for concentration.
This, however, is something else. In case it’s been a long week….
I will spare you the colorectal surgeon song.
Well, maybe not.
There is plenty more where they came from, but I will stop now…
September 30, 2009 – 11:50 am
How do we know if our general practice/hospital/dentist/aged care service is providing safe and quality care? At the moment, it’s almost impossible to answer this question in any objective manner.
But at least we now have some idea of what sort of questions we should be asking, thanks to a report released this week by [...]
September 30, 2009 – 9:28 am
As previously reported on Croakey, the Consumers Health Forum is not at all impressed by the Australian Society of Ophthalmologists campaign “to inform the public about the consequences of the Cataract Rebate cut planned for November 2009″.
In my view the campaign was undermined, before I even got [...]
September 9, 2009 – 3:30 pm
The Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Mark Butler, issued this release yesterday, clearly intending to allay concerns raised by the Sydney Morning Herald’s stories sounding the alarm about the marketing and use of medical devices.
Instead, he seems to have added fuel to the fire – at least, according to Dr Ken Harvey, who argues that the [...]
August 19, 2009 – 10:52 am
The PM made a big deal about the need to ensure treatments are evaluated and backed by good evidence in this widely-reported speech at St Vincent’s Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne last Friday.
He said: “ Patients need treatments, technologies, and procedures for which there is evidence from research that these are safe and effective. [...]
August 7, 2009 – 12:04 pm
Ray Moynihan wrote this Crikey piece about two new trials, published in the latest New England Journal of Medicine, that raise serious questions about the ongoing use of a controversial procedure called vertebroplasty, where bone cement is injected into a person’s vertebrae to try and fix painful spinal fractures.
Writing from Washington, health policy analyst Dr [...]
Croakey has previously argued that the Productivity Commission inquiry into public and private hospital performance has overly narrow terms of reference.
Below you can read some more suggestions for the Commission from several Croakey contributors, but first have a look at how much further the debate on hospital performance has advanced in some other countries.
In the [...]
By Croakey
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Also posted in Hospitals, Indigenous health, Media-related issues, adverse events, evidence-based issues, quality and safety of health care, rural and remote health
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Tagged hospital performance, Hospitals, Indigenous health, patient safety, Productivity Commission, rural and remote health
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Professor Guy Maddern, RP Jepson Professor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide, has some suggestions for the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into the relative performance of public and private hospitals (further to the recent Croakey post on this matter).
He writes:
“Any assessment of the public and private sector needs to look at a range of [...]
Health bureaucracies and their public affairs units, ministerial staffers and health service managers make a powerful effort to stop people who work within the public health system from engaging in public debate.
On one hand, this is understandable – if everyone was hitting the headlines, complaining about the lack of resourcing to their particular area, then [...]
Professor Guy Maddern, professor of surgery at the University of Adelaide, comments on the ongoing controversy over guideline development (see posts below for more background):
“The nature and content of health care needs to be constantly reviewed. This remains an enormous challenge as the impact of new developments, new understandings of disease and the access to [...]
