Welcome to Episode 4 of Good Will Hunters, in our new series on SDG 3 - Good Health and Wellbeing.

So far in the series, we’ve looked at maternal and child health and infectious diseases. The response to the series has been enormous - last week I appeared on Radio New Zealand talking about the unacceptably high rates of child mortality in Kiribati. This series was designed to raise attention to the fact that we are not on track to meeting SDG3, and we must take urgent action.

Today I am talking to Dr Rosemary Wyber about SDG 3.4, which relates to non-communicable diseases. Non-comunicable diseases, also known as chronic diseases, are not passed from person to person. This includes heart diseases, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and chronic lung disease. For those that follow me on LinkedIn, you would know I have spent a part of this year working in Timor-Leste on strengthening the local cardiology workforce, in response too extremely high rates of rheumatic heart disease. Hence, I wanted to focus today’s episode on heart disease, and who better to speak to than Dr Rosemary Wyber.

Rosemary is a General Practitioner, and also holds a Masters of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health general practice training in Aboriginal Community Controlled Clinics in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Dr Wyber’s doctoral research focused on rheumatic heart disease in Australia and internationally. She was the lead author of the RHD Endgame Strategy to eliminate RHD in Australia. Her postdoctoral research continues to address RHD and broader heart health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In this episode, we talk about what rheumatic heart disease is, how it is managed, and how health systems can better address it.