Legal requirements for doctors to report family violence to police may sound good at first glance. But evidence shows it’s better doctors are trained to support women to make their own decisions.
Skilled mid level health care workers can relieve the workload of other health care workers and can help make universal health care a reality for South Africans.
At a ceremony in Townsville today, four people will graduate from James Cook University’s physician assistant program. They will be Australia’s first bachelor’s graduates in that field. This is an important…
A medical colleague was shaking his head in disgust. “What is wrong with these medical students today?” he asked. “They just don’t have the same work ethic they used to. In our day, we didn’t have to be…
Here’s what I remember. It was 14 years ago, and I was a junior doctor working in psychiatry. Some colleagues planned a dinner as an end-of-term celebration and, despite reasonable incomes, they decided…
Across hospitals and doctor’s surgeries every day, patients have to make difficult choices. But for most of us the freedom to decide what happens to our bodies is taken for granted – doctors recommend…
Should Australian health-care workers face criminal penalties if they wilfully or recklessly neglect or mistreat patients? The United Kingdom is currently grappling with this question after systemic failures…
The use of medicine as an “instrument of violence” in both the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict shows how blurred the lines between civilian and combatant spaces can become. According to the authors of…
When we think of what defines a medical consultation, we quite reasonably think of the “presenting complaint”: the medical problem which the patient brings to the doctor. In movies, literature, common…
As a GP, when I prescribe a drug, I need to know its likely benefits and risks, and I need to base my decision-making on the best available evidence. I’d like to think the same principle applies to the…
Consensus and evidence suggests a compulsory co-payment of A$6 for a visit to the general practitioner will reduce population health but might save some money. Can we not try a bit harder and think of…
Annie Sparrow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
We don’t know the exact details of why Abbas Khan, the British surgeon who died while in custody, was arrested last November at a regime checkpoint in Syria and imprisoned and tortured, or the manner of…
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne