Pomegranate Health by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians

04.11.2024

[Journal Club] Baricitinib immune therapy for new onset type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes has a very high treatment burden in terms of direct costs, inconvenience and lost productivity for patients and their carers. Further, all the glucose checking, hormone replacement and consults don’t abolish the vascular complications associated with poor...

03.25.2024

Ep106: The whiskey fix and the apple of Granada

Today’s guests are the hosts of This Medical Life, a wonderful podcast that delves into the archives of medical history. Dr Travis Brown describes the period after World War I when the Spanish Flu was killing tens of millions around...

02.26.2024

Ep105: When parents and paediatrics clash

Last November an NHS Hospital Trust in Nottingham sought permission from the UK High Court to withdraw life support from a seven-month old girl called Indi Gregory. The devastated parents did not want to give up on her although they...

01.30.2024

[IMJ On-Air] Is the jury still out on omega-3 supplementation?

The theory that certain fatty acids are essential to the diet and associated with reduced cardiovascular risk has been controversial since it was floated in the 1950s. In 1971 Danish researchers published the results from a cross-sectional study of Inuit...

12.11.2023

[IMJ On-Air] HepatoCare: a model for palliative and supportive care in advanced cirrhosis

Median survival for patients diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis is around 2 years and quality of life is poor. Fewer than a quarter of such patients receive referrals to palliative care and advanced care plans are also rare. Existing research from...

11.13.2023

Ep102: Staying on script with semaglutide

Semaglutide, branded as Ozempic or Wegovy, is an analogue of glucagon-like peptide 1 which has glucose-dependent effects on insulin secretion. In this episode we discuss how semaglutide performs as an antihyperglycaemic agent compared to previous GLP-1 analogues and the soon-to-be...

09.26.2023

Ep101: Setting the standard for workforce wellbeing

We’ve known for a decade that about 50 percent of doctors meet the criteria for burnout, and the figure is up to 70 percent among trainees. But organisations have been left to come up with their own solutions to this,...

08.16.2023

Ep100: Conversations with ChatGPT

This is the final episode in a five-part series about artificial intelligence in medicine. We start by weighing up the costs and benefits of automation in a health system that’s increasingly pushed beyond capacity. One of the biggest time sinks...

08.09.2023

Ep99: When AI goes wrong

This is the fourth part in a series on artificial intelligence in medicine and we try and unpick the causes and consequences of adverse events resulting from this technology. Our guest David Lyell is a research fellow at the Australian...

07.16.2023

[IMJ On-Air] A tiger in the mallee: Victoria’s JEV cluster

On the 28th of January 2022 a 75-year-old man was admitted to the regional Albury Wodonga Health Service with a high fever and Parkinsonian symptoms. The patient spent over a week in intensive care, but brain scans did not reveal...

07.05.2023

Ep97: The governance of AI

This is the third part of a series on artificial intelligence in medicine. Previously we explained how to train and test machine learning models that assist in decision-making, and then how to iron out ergonomic friction points in the clinical...

06.21.2023

Ep96: The ergonomics of AI

The allure of having devices and tasks assisted by artificial intelligence is that they will help overcome some of the natural limits of human cognition with regards to working memory and attention. And in helping with the mundane tasks, AI...

06.14.2023

Ep95: Machine Learning 101

AI-assisted healthcare is reaching maturity in many applications and could alleviate some of the capacity gap increasingly faced by health systems . Over the next three podcasts we focus on artificial intelligence tools designed to assist directly with clinical practice. Most...

05.12.2023

Ep94: Facing up to racial bias

In today’s podcast we try and understand the impact that racial bias makes on variation in clinical care. For example, racialized patterns in the use of analgesia were brought to light over 20 years ago but are still occurring today....

04.17.2023

Ep93: The rise and fall of mpox

The first time most of us heard of monkeypox was in May 2022. The smallpox-like infection appeared to spring from nowhere and make its way through Europe then the Americas, largely within the gay and bisexual community. But the first...

02.27.2023

Ep92: Data-driven practice improvement

Medical and administrative records are normally collected to help the management of patients or institutions, but it can be time consuming to extract metrics useful for practice improvement. The field known as Practice Analytics seeks to transform these data and...

01.16.2023

[IMJ On-Air] Hyperglycaemia and COVID-19

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a handful of international studies showed that there was increased risk of adverse outcomes in hospitalised patients comorbid for diabetes. Odds ratios for mortality conferred by pre-existing diabetes ranged from 1.5 to...

12.21.2022

[IMJ On-Air] High readmission rates in cirrhotic patients

Hospitalisation rates for cirrhosis are increasing in Australia in part associated with the high prevalence of obesity and subsequent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. More concerning still is the frequency with which discharged patients are readmitted within 30 days. One systematic...

12.14.2022

Ep89: What we know about long COVID

ADAPT is a prospective cohort study that has been following up COVID-19 patients since the earliest days of the pandemic. It has allowed researchers to track the emergence of long COVID, a syndrome that includes symptoms such as ongoing breathlessness,...

11.16.2022

[IMJ On-Air] Making sense of HACs

Clinical complications suffered by patients during hospital stays are assumed to be preventable and to provide some metric of quality of care. To assist in their understanding and mitigation the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare established a...

10.25.2022

[IMJ On-Air] Managing cannabinoid use in palliative care

Pomegranate Health is seeking fresh ears on the Podcast Editorial Group. Responsibilities of group members are to > discuss new podcast topics > suggest themes to explore and people to interview > listen to audio drafts and provide feedback before publication Group communication is...

09.13.2022

[IMJ On-Air] Recent advances in asthma management

Pomegranate Health is seeking fresh ears on the Podcast Editorial Group. Responsibilities of group members are to > discuss new podcast topics > suggest themes to explore and people to interview > listen to audio drafts and provide feedback before publication Group communication is...

08.31.2022

Ep85: The ASD Odyssey- a reply

The National Guideline for the Assessment and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Australia aspires to streamline referral pathways so that children can get the right help as early as possible. But despite the best intentions of many clinicians, there...

08.16.2022

Ep84: The ASD Odyssey

The average age at which autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed four, though signs are often present well before that. Even where families and GPs may have concerns early in a child’s development, it can take a year or more for...

07.11.2022

Ep83: Loving Medicine Again

In the last episode we heard some powerful examples of the challenges faced by some practitioners in medicine. Every situation has its idiosyncrasies, but most people start out with a passion for what they’re doing. In today’s podcast we hear...

06.21.2022

Ep82: Coming back from Burnout— Congress 2022

Not a day goes by that there isn’t a headline about the overstretched health service and the struggling professionals within it. It isn’t COVID that has created this situation. The pandemic was just the straw that broke the camel’s back....

06.03.2022

Ep81: Advocacy from the Top

In episode 78 we heard from some physicians who found themselves taking up the role of advocate, not just for their own patients but for broader system change. And health policy lobbyist Patrick Tobin explained how physicians and the College...

05.02.2022

Ep80: Healthcare in a Volatile Climate

The globe has already warmed by more than one degree Celsius over pre-industrial levels and is on track to exceed two degrees by the end of the century. It doesn’t sound like a lot but this will have profound effects...

03.29.2022

Ep79: Melanoma vs the Double-Edged Sword

Immune checkpoint inhibitors have revolutionised care for patients with advanced melanoma and other cancers. These days around half of patients with unresectable metastatic melanoma can expect to live to five years after a regime of agents such as nivolumab and...

03.02.2022

Ep78: The Advocate’s Journey

The core work of being a physician is demanding enough. But if you’re seeing patients come in day after day with ailments that have social determinants behind them, you may start to feel like Sisyphus; heaving that boulder up the...

01.11.2022

Ep77: Deciding with Children

This episode is shared from the Essential Ethics podcast produced at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. It is presented by paediatric respiratory physician John Massie and clinical ethicist Lynn Gillam who are respectively the Clinical Lead and Academic Director...

12.07.2021

Ep76: Making Amends- Medical Injury Part 3

This is the third podcast in a series about medical injury. First we talked about what victims of injury want to hear from the health system after such an event. And then we discussed the guilt and compromised professional identity...

11.09.2021

Ep75: Feeling Guilty- Medical Injury Part 2

In the last episode we talked about what patients or their families want to hear after a iatrogenic injury. Despite best practice standards for open disclosure, this occurs far less often that it should. The reluctance from health practitioners to...

10.22.2021

Ep74: Saying Sorry- Medical Injury Part 1

Medical injury occurs at a rate of about 12 per cent of admissions, and errors without consequence at a higher rate still. According to Australian and New Zealand guidance documents, disclosure of error “is a patient right, anchored in professional...

09.23.2021

Ep73: Communicating a Pandemic

There are many layers of public health interventions that can reduce the rate of transmission of the novel coronavirus. Social distancing, mask wearing, lockdowns and vaccines each nudge the reproduction number down. But you need all of them working together...

09.15.2021

Ep72: Modelling a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to public attention, like never before, the work of public health physicians as well as epidemiologists, statisticians and computer modelers. The crisis also shown how hard it is to take decisions affecting the lives of...

07.20.2021

Ep71: Voluntary Assisted Dying—what have we learned?

In 2017, Victoria was the first state in Australia to pass voluntary assisted legislation and has been followed by Western Australia, Tasmania and now South Australia. Aotearoa-New Zealand passed its End-of-life Choice Bill two years ago and that will go...

06.10.2021

Ep70: Zeroing in on “the renal troponin”

Acute Kidney Injury makes a greater contribution to early mortality than acute myocardial infarction and it's been argued we should consider the concept of “kidney attack” to give it the weight that it deserves. But the presentation of kidney injury...

04.15.2021

Ep69: Gendered Medicine—Funding and Research

This is the third and final part of our series on gendered medicine. We step back and look at the way that health care and research are funded. It’s been said that the health needs of women are undervalued by...

03.22.2021

Ep68: Gendered Medicine—Pain

Gender can be considered a social determinant of health, in the different pressures and expectations it puts on women and men. For example, the taboos around menstruation are so profound that many young women are dangerously naïve about their own...

01.31.2021

Ep67: Boosting Public Health in the Indo-Pacific

This is the fourth and final part in our series on Global Health Security. Australia’s Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security was launched in 2017 to provide development assistance to health services as far-flung as Fiji, Cambodia and Timor L’este. Its...

01.17.2021

Ep66: Gendered Medicine—Heart Disease

We traditionally think of cardiovascular disease as a man’s problem, but it’s the leading cause of death for women as well as men in most of the industrialized world. Despite great advances in the management of heart disease in recent...

11.12.2020

Ep65: A New Script for Global Public Health

In this episode we present some provocative solutions to problems presented in the previous two stories.We heard about pharmaceutical patents, and how embedded intellectual property law is in global trade relations. There’s this fundamental assumption that innovation occurs thanks only...

11.03.2020

Ep64: Big Pharma and the People’s Vaccine

This is part 2 in our series on global public health and focuses on the impact of intellectual property laws on the development and distribution of pharmaceuticals. The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a frenzy of vaccine development never seen before,...

10.06.2020

Ep63: the WHO’s Biggest Test

During the COVID-19 crisis there has been some criticism of the World Health Organisation as to whether it declared a pandemic soon enough or covered up for China’s failings. But few commentators have explained the role and responsibilities it shares...

08.11.2020

Ep62: Essential Ethics in Adolescent Health

In episode 59 we shared a sampler of the Essential Ethics podcast from the Children's Bioethics Centre, at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. A couple of cases studies were presented to help us define “the Zone of Parental Discretion” –...

07.09.2020

Ep61: Delirium Part 2- Prevention and Management

In the previous episode we discussed the presentations and screening of delirium, as well as the risk factors. Just as important as these medical and iatrogenic precipitants are a host of environmental triggers that are highly modifiable. Anything that contributes...

07.08.2020

Ep60: Delirium Part 1- Detection and Causes

Delirium is associated with an increased risk of falls, dementia and high dependency care, and all of this adds up to higher mortality. About a third of patients admitted to ICU or approaching the end of life experience delirium. But...

06.15.2020

Ep59: Essential Ethics in Paediatrics

The ethical questions that come up in paediatrics can appear overwhelming to begin with. When can a child be said to have cognitive capacity and bodily autonomy? For those who don’t, where does the guardianship of the parent to give...

05.11.2020

Ep58: Billing Part 2—Compliance and the Free Market

In this episode we continue the discussion from Episode 56 about medical billing in Australia. Almost 500 million Medicare rebates are processed every year and for the most part these are claimed appropriately. But non-compliant billing could be costing the...

What's Pomegranate Health about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Pomegranate Health episodes: