Author: healthprofessionalradio

Overview:

• Federal Labor will not support the Medicare levy for Australians earning less than $87,000 a year, arguing high-income earners must pay a greater contribution. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has also used his budget reply speech in Parliament to call for the temporary deficit levy to be continued for high-income earners.

• Chief executive of Western Desert Dialysis Sarah Brown was the only Northern Territory entrant in the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Awards. has been named Australia’s top nurse at a ceremony in Brisbane. She works at the Purple House, which provides dialysis services to remote patients in the NT and Western Australia.

• A bill to decriminalise abortion has been voted down in New South Wales Parliament. Members of the public gallery yelled “shame” as it was announced the bill had been defeated 25 to 14.

Overview:

• The Windarring Copy Centres in the central Victorian towns of Castlemaine and Gisborne will close just before Christmas — potentially putting eight people out of work. Windarring chief executive Chris O’Connor said funding changes under the NDIS meant the businesses could no longer remain open.

• In Australia in 2010 only 19.5 per cent of scripts issued by GPs used the generic term for a drug, compared with 83 per cent in the United Kingdom. The main problem with all these multiple names is the potential for confusion, especially for those most likely to use multiple medications — the elderly. As a result, patients are at risk of not understanding which medications they are taking or why they are taking them. An advisory group for Australian pharmaceuticals, well aware of the dangers this confusion can cause, promoted the use of prescribing and labelling with generic terms as far back as 2005.

• More than 50 people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia have presented to hospital with severe diarrhoea. Three children have also been airlifted to Broome Hospital to be treated for suspected rotavirus infection.

Overview:

• Associate Professor Patrick Charles, from the Department of Infectious Diseases at Austin Health, has presented evidence of the unusual side-effects of Faecal transplants to specialists at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians congress in Melbourne. He said while the science is not yet at the stage where doctors could treat conditions like depressive and weight disorders with faecal transplants, it was only the tip of the iceberg.

• Nursing posts in the towns of Cue, Mt Magnet and Yalgoo were unmanned for up to three days last week when the WA Country Health Service (WACHS) was unable to source coverage for the sites. Six shires across the Mid West and Murchison have renewed calls for the minimum numbers of staff at regional nursing posts to be increased from one to three.

• Professor Gabrielle Belz, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, said it was clear that hormones were “acting in different types of receptors in men and women to effect outcomes for viral infections and allergic diseases.” The study identified the immune cells that were associated with asthma, and found high levels of testosterone in men lead to them having fewer of the cells than women.

Overview:

• The Federal Court found online companies Joystick, Social-Lites and ‘Elusion’ all made e-cigarettes that contained carcinogens and toxins, despite advertising the products as safe. The companies as well as two directors and one CEO have been ordered to pay penalties ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, totalling $175,000.

• Shifting from the current Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) site to the new one will require a command centre, an ambulance fleet and special traffic controls as patients are transported from one end of North Terrace in the CBD to the other in early September.

• The Health Care Complaints Commission has released its 2015-16 annual report, showing A record number of people in New South Wales were unhappy with medical treatments – 6,075 complaints were received over the time period. The commission’s report attributed the increase of complaints to factors including patients taking greater control of their health care, social media, population growth and an ageing population.

Overview:

• Doctors interfering in domestic violence situations could be doing more harm than good, warned by the Australian Medical Association.ood.

• Stephen Wade said SA Health figures showed more influenza cases had already been reported this year, prompting the South Australian Government to rule out moving the new Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) this winter

• Children with bone cancers and tumours will have access at South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), a cancer treatment facility to be operational in Adelaide by 2020.