As many of you would know the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons has recently released its expert advisory group Draft Report into discrimination, bullying and harassment in surgery. The results of the report are confronting even if they are unfortunately not altogether surprising.
If like me, you can’t believe that it is nearly September then let me hit you with another bit of news. Palliverse is having its first birthday!
Birthday Cake by Will Clayton / CC BY
And we have decided to give ourselves a bit of a present – a new look.
This morning an article was published in the conversation by Ray Moynihan and Dr Iona Heath exploring how our society deals with the uncertainty of our future health. Faced with the knowledge that all of us will get sick and die at some stage the authors suggest that this impels us all to try and find the solution to these problems, resulting in the medicalisation of our lives, over-diagnosis and over-treatment.
As many who work in palliative medicine would be acutely aware the process of applying for next year’s job is beginning in earnest.
High on the “must do” list for some. cc https://www.flazingo.com/creativecommons
I have just been prompted to have a look at the excellent eLearning Pain Module for the RACP. In short it is a fantastic resource that I encourage anyone with access to have a look at here. As I understand it access to this resource is limited to fellows and trainees of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and its administrators so my apologies to anyone not fitting that description reading this blog, as the following may come across as a bit of a tease. (Ed Correction: We have just been informed that anyone can apply for access through the site linked above – i.e. Read on, it is not a tease at all)
RACP eLearning website https://elearning.racp.edu.au/
The recent senate inquiry into “Availability of new innovative and specialist cancer drugs in Australia” brought timely attention to our Australia’s approach to access and funding of cancer medications. Perhaps unsurprisingly the matter of access to medications for palliative care was not seen as the chief focus of this review, but on closer attention perhaps it received more discussion than was realised.
By Photo taken byAney CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Happy New(ish) Year everyone!
To celebrate we are starting a new segment. It goes without saying that many people and groups around our region are doing wonderful and exciting work in palliative care research but it can feel a little lonely out there for many of us. Finding support to develop your idea, and others with a similar interest can be a challenge. In addition to the palliverse researcher database we thought another way for us all to feel connected was to start to get to know the more established players. So let’s start with some introductions. We have been contacting the various academic and research institutions working in palliative research in our region asking them to tell us a little bit about themselves. “Tour of the teams” will be an ongoing series to bring the responses from these units together.
An actual “tour” was unfortunately deemed impractical
We hope that the “Tour” will help us all be a little more connected and maybe to give us all some ideas of where we can get help to develop that great research idea that we have been sitting on.
The service who gets the gold star for being first off the mark is the ImPaCCT group
Dear members of the palliverse,
We have been informed of a new funding opportunity by the Improving Palliative Care through Clinical Trials (ImPaCCT) NSW network. Here are the details that they provided.
Palliative Care (Full-Time, $30,000 per annum for 3 years, Based in Sydney) focusing on sleep disturbance in community palliative care patients.
“I am done. I am over,” says Bob before failing back to the pillow with quiet momentum.
“It’s like he is rushing down a river, and we have nothing we can do to slow him down,” says his daughter. Her voice is strong and carries the pain of her words in a no nonsense way, like it is not a burden at all. They are both strong like this, a family trait, and their strength fills the room. It almost vibrates with the effort.
Now, which way to choose?
palliverse.com 