Category: Health

When he was Treasurer Paul Keating complained that the resident galah in every pet shop across Australia was talking about microeconomic reform. Over the last few months the galahs have learned a new script: health reform. (more…)

Everyone who has suffered abuse as a child deserves the opportunity to live free of its detrimental effects. (more…)

On the 28^th November 2023 the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 (NSW) (the NSW VAD Act) will come into force. (more…)

The vehemence with which the medical profession opposes any moves on behalf of nurses and other health professionals to move legitimately into Primary Health Care in their own right is telling. A system in which some professional groups spend an inordinate amount of time propping up the work of another is not to be abandoned lightly. (more…)

The Medicare Review contains welcome aspirations, but the instruments to achieve them are poorly delineated. (more…)

Hardly a month goes by without a new media report (and here) of alleged scandalous conduct of some doctors who call themselves ‘cosmetic surgeons’ but who lack recognised specialised surgical training. These reports have tended to focus on the harm done to patients and generally failed to explain to the public how and why the situation has arisen. While some commentators have blamed the medical profession for failing to regulate itself, this is far from the reality. (more…)

The recommendations of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce released last week, like almost any serious health reform in Australia, require joint Commonwealth and state action. (more…)

In Australia, we pride ourselves on our egalitarianism, yet now cannot even provide security of accommodation for everyone. How can this be, when older women who have lost their financial security from family break-up and illness, and even young women with small children, end up couch-surfing or sleeping in a car? (more…)

Australia’s position as America-lite, a little sibling stumbling along the line between voracious neoliberalism and violent abnegation of its own history, comes into distinct relief every so often. (more…)

State and territory first ministers are again pressing national cabinet to consider health care reform as its top priority at the first meeting for 2023. We have heard this song before. (more…)

Why do we have a problem in recruiting General Practitioners and how can we overcome the shortage? The answer – to quote Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister in the Post World War II Labour Government: ‘By stuffing their mouth with Gold’. (more…)

I wish to write here in a frank and open way about the way the progression of Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA) has severely impacted the proceedings of everyday life, I am now 60 years old and the progression is well advanced. I am writing from the standpoint of what those in my profession of sociology would say is “participant observation.” (more…)

There is much hoo-ha following the government’s decision to revert to 10 subsidised psychology sessions from the pandemic-fuelled 20 sessions in place for the last couple of years. (more…)

Proposals to reform how Medicare supports primary care need to take account of the changed ownership structure of general practice as well as changing health needs. (more…)

In our third year of the pandemic while the government sends out bland statements, Covid-19 has not gone away. (more…)

Australia has no national policy to prevent the rising death toll in heatwaves. The provision of insulated and air conditioned housing in many remote communities will take years. In the meantime heat shelters must be urgently provided. (more…)