A place where my interests on health, remote Australia, Indigenous issues and pharmacy collide
This skit from Mitchell and Webb looks at what happens when emergency cases are brought into a homeopathic hospital’s Emergency Department.
It is nearly as funny as the fact Australian private health funds continue to subsidise this sort of quackery.
The medical observer today had an article on GPs involved in the response effort including helping patients out with lost scripts as people left their homes with minimal or no belongings.
There are two ways you can obtain medications besides seeing your doctor. Your pharmacist can provide three days emergency supply or can contact your doctor on your behalf to confirm the medication and ensure the scripts are sent to the pharmacy “as soon as practicable” as stated in the Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Regulations 2008 (NSW).
There are also ways to have authority prescriptions ordered earlier and pick up an early supply of your medication if you have the script but no medication.
All these are encompassed in the relevant state and federal law but brought together in the the advice provided by the federal Department of Health for areas affected by bushfire.
The document also has information for pharmacists on claiming for prescriptions if phone lines are down or their prescription claim is destroyed by fire.
We welcomed a lot of first timers to the Health Care Social Media Australia and New Zealand (#hcsmanz) tweetup held tonight. The relevance and immediacy of the topic due to the floods in Queensland may have had something to do with it.
The use of social media in disseminating information and correcting rumours by the Queensland Police Service during the flooding in Queensland and particularly Brisbane was praised by all.
Here are links to the transcript of this evening’s tweetup and links posted during the discussion
is a discussion group of interested professionals working in the health sphere in Australia and New Zealand have commenced a weekly discussion group on Twitter looking at the issues of social media use in health care. The hash-tag #hcsmanz is used to view the conversation. At other times the hash-tag is used to identify material that may be interesting to those in the discussion group.
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The tweetup is held each Sunday evening at 22:00NZ, 20:00AEDT, 19:00AEST, 19:30ACDT, 17:00AWST. Please come and join us.
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.
This is the first edition of the Residential Aged Care Practice Change. Rather than looking at deaths in Aged Care facilities brought to the attention of the coroner it is looking at improvements resulting from changes in practice at individual Aged Care Services.
Just a reminder.
The aims of the Communiqué are:
• To improve the awareness of clinicians, health workers, carers and those in positions of governance about adverse events resulting from systems failures. Lessons from past cases can then be applied to their own institutions.
• To improve residential aged care workers’ understanding of the coronial system and the work performed by the Clinical Liaison Service.
You can subscribe by email at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine with the communiqué becoming available online much later.
