Category Archives: public health

Healthcare and Social Media Discussion on Twitter

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health care social media Australia and New Zealand Last night Australia and New Zealand had their inaugural “Tweetup” using the hash-tag #hcsmanz with about 20 participants from nursing, medical, pharmacy, public health, IT and others. A Tweetup will be held each Sunday evening at 22:00NZ, 20:00AEDT, 19:00AEST, 19:30ACDT, 17:00AWST.

Twitter has been in the news a bit in Australia. Mainly due to the Australian newspaper outing a pseudonymous blogger and recently threatening to sue a journalism academic. A view that seems to have been taken by some in the media is that Twitter is full of anonymous trolls defaming away left, right and centre.

What it really is is a terrific for communication and dissemination of information at whatever level you wish to use it, informally or in a more formal manner.

Several regular discussion groups looking at the use of social media in health care meet on twitter at various times. The European Union have one as does the USA and Canada.

Our first discussion looked at the recently released AMA guidelines “Social Media and the Medical Profession” and issues encountered in using social media in your health/healthcare setting. It already seems to have kicked a goal with the transcript being sent to the AMA Council of Doctors-in-Training and Guidelines Working group.

If you wish to know more send a message to myself, Ed Butler or Ben Harris-Roxas or follow @hcsmanz on Twitter.

You can set up a hashtag #hcsmanz on your twitter-feed to follow and participate in the discussion and even subscribe to a “newspaper”, The #hcsmanz Daily to see the interesting links produced during the discussion.

There is a #hcsmanz page which shows the last 100 tweets and links to transcripts of each meeting.

We look forward to seeing you next week.

Before I finish up I thought I would show a couple of the more interesting links placed into the conversation last night.

The first links to “Social Media – Telstra’s 3 Rs of Social Media Engagement” (PDF) and the second to an interesting slide show titled “IT, Professionalism, and Your Digital Identity” produced by Dr Stuart Morrison for fifth year medical students at Monash University in November.

IT, Professionalism, and Your Digital Identity on Prezi

Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – Fiscal Challenges

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The 109 page briefing document provided to the new Finance Minister Penny Wong by the Secretary of the Department of Finance and Deregulation is now online.

Well the “expurgated” version is available anyway.

There are a couple of pages related to health costs. “Health Reform – National Health & Hospitals Network” and “Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – fiscal challenges”. These are highlighted within the report as their growth rate is above 2% and in the case of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme has a special appropriation for funds to run the program.

The document can be found on the government website here or in my Google Documents below.

And enjoy John Cleese as he looks for the Expurgated book of British Birds.

Building Parent Confidence

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Professor Sven Silburn is a researcher at Menzies School of Health Research. He was worked in the area of clinical child psychology and has been employed at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.

In this short interview on CAAMA radio on the 22nd Sept 2010 he talks about a new Indigenous program “Building Parent Confidence and talks about the problems in Indigenous Health including the social determinants. It’s well worth the listen. (click on the picture to go to the CAAMA interview)

A Load of Pertussis

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old phot of vaccinationCanada has a travel advisory for California. A health advisory on pertussis (whooping cough).

In most countries pertussis is a notifiable illness. This year California has had a sevenfold increase in pertussis notifications. All other states have declined a little or remained about the same as last year.

I imagine a lot more people from Canada travel to California to Australia and a sevenfold increase sounds quite a lot. The number of notifications up to 24th August was 3,311. Checking all current health advisories from Canada shows no current health advisory for Australia yet Australia has about 2000 notifications for pertussis each month.

Year to date figures (5th September) show Australian pertussis notifications for this year have reached 14865 (and probably will be lower than last year’s number of 29737). If we look at it another way Australia has so far had 14865 pertussis cases for around 22 million people with California having 3311 cases for 36 or so million people.

This table from the Department of Health (2005 figures the latest I could find a comparison) shows it very clearly.

Most recent notification rates per 100,000 population for frequently notified vaccine preventable diseases, by country of residence

Why haven’t the Canadians issued a travel advisory against Australia. As an Australian I feel ignored!. Perhaps they are worried about 3311 notifications all packed close together in a state only twice as big as Victoria, our second smaller state.

But enough joking.

Pertussis is a life threatening condition. In Australia sixty per cent of all notifications are in the over 20 age group. With a vaccination schedule including vaccination for pertussis at 2, 4, 6 months and 4 years of age (some states have a booster at school) babies under six months of age are at highest risk (21% of notifications in 2008) due to partial immunisation. Between 1993 and 2006 there were 21 deaths in Australia caused by pertussis. 17 of these were in infants less than twelve months of age.

There is some good information here and here(PDFs).

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