Vaccine refusers proving hard to sway
Amended NSW legislation requiring child care centres to record the vaccination status of enrolled children has succeeded in reminding families of the need to keep vaccinations up to date.
However, there has been little if any impact on those families regarding themselves as ‘conscientious objectors’, or vaccine refusers.
These are the key results of research* conducted at child-care centres in the NSW Northern Rivers by a team that included Dr Sabrina Pit of the University Centre for Rural Health North Coast, and Marianne Trent of the North Coast Public Health Unit. Two of the 12 targeted child-care centres declined to participate in the study.
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- Written by: Robin Osborne
When Breath Becomes Air - Book Review
Book Review
Paul Kalanithi
The Bodley Head, 228pp
Reviewed by Robin Osborne
In all respects except one, Dr Kalanithi’s memoir continues the tradition of fine authorship by US doctors of Indian descent. His most notable predecessors are Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning study of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, and the forthcoming The Gene, and Atul Gawande (Being Mortal, The Checklist Manifesto).
The key difference is that while the others still practice medicine and write, Kalanithi’s book has been published posthumously, following his death last year of metastatic lung cancer, at the age of just 37.
While the book is thus immensely sad, it is also an inspiring portrait of the mind and work of a brilliant man.
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- Written by: Robin Osborne
Local Integrated Care Strategy a statewide first
Northern NSW Local Health District is leading the state with a newly commenced, 200-person trial of a key part of its Integrated Care Strategy: Admission and Discharge Notifications (ADNs).
These notifications will immediately and automatically notify GPs when their patients are admitted to, or discharged from, local hospitals.
The trial is focused on selected chronic disease patients and capturing unplanned admissions to hospitals in the Tweed/Byron and Richmond areas, including the major referral hospitals, Lismore Base and Tweed, as well as the district hospitals, such as Casino, Ballina, Murwillumbah, and the soon to open Byron Central Hospital.
Results of the Notifications Trial will be shared with participating GPs - totalling 55 - and staff at the facilities. An evaluation after three months will be used to review and, where necessary, improve the service.
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- Written by: Robin Osborne
The Birdman of Goonellabah
Wal Bailey, turning 80 at the time this article was being prepared, is a platypus whisperer, managing to entice the notoriously shy creatures up from their watery hiding places to the surface.
There, they swim around in circles, putting on a display that seems designed to provide him with maximum opportunity to take wonderful photographs.
Armed with a high-end Nikon digital SLR and telephoto lenses, Wal is happy to oblige, and the results of his encounters over the years are testament to the relationships he has developed with a creature considered by the early colonials to be implausibly bizarre.
Seeing one platypus in the wild is unusual enough - Charles Darwin was the first Britisher to see one, near Bathurst, in 1836. Seeing two of them mating is astounding, as is the fact that the habitat of the animals in question is not a remote outback setting but the aptly named Platypus Park nature reserve in Lismore’s crowded suburb of Goonellabah.
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- Written by: Robin Osborne
The A-B-C to-do list for mental wellbeing
Maintaining our mental health is just as important as keeping physically fit. Professor Rob Donovan from Curtin University in WA has developed a health promotion campaign called Act-Belong-Commit (A-B-C) based on extensive research.
This comprehensive campaign encourages individuals to take action to protect and promote their own mental wellbeing as well as organisations to provide mentally healthy activities to promote participation in those activities. The A-B-C guidelines for positive mental health provide an approach that we can easily adopt:
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- Written by: Andrew Binns
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