The Handover

Empathy, sympathy, compassion, pity and now: mirror synaesthesia. I’m confused.

 As healthcare professionals, we are told the gold standard is empathy when it comes to understanding those in our care, yet what does this really mean? And, is it actually a genuine emotion or an aspiration? Or, perhaps even a convenient fiction? How do I know if I’m being empathetic and not simply deluding myself and doing nothing more than projecting my own emotions and assumptions onto my patients?

And then there is the new kid on the block, mirror synaesthesia, which is akin to empathy on steroids, and might just be pseudoscience…

 How do you feel about this? Me? I’m really confused. So, in this episode,  we’re going to explore the underlying assumptions that inform these concepts and separate what’s grounded in evidence, and what’s based in wishful thinking.

The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information, visit https://www.ausmed.com.au.

Every year the global scientific community comes together and hosts the Ig Nobel Prize Awards for pointless research.

The award ceremony is basically a big booze-up, but it is attended by genuine Nobel prize winners, the world’s leading scientists, science journalists, medical researchers and a who’s-who of the global scientific community.

The point of the awards is to make people laugh, for scientists to poke fun at themselves, and to make people realise that science can, indeed, be fun! 

But, last year, in my opinion, they marked themselves as distinctly non-inclusive in their candidate choice as they overlooked (or omitted) one of the unsung heroes of the global medical research program: Lego Minifigures.

In this episode, I’m going to take a look at some of the past winners of the Ig Nobel Prize and review some important research that was ignored or overlooked that, in my opinion, should have been the hands-down winner of 2019. 

The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information, visit https://www.ausmed.com.au/.

The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated considerable debate in one really contentious area of healthcare: Should we be providing extremely limited human and material resources to care for those people who, historically, may not be compliant with the recommended management of their chronic diseases and health? In this episode of The Handover, I’m not exactly going to respond to that issue directly, but rather, I’m going to look at one of the deeply troubling assumptions that underpin this question in the first place, particularly the concept of compliance. And, I’m going to suggest that, for several reasons, we have developed a really skewed perspective of what 'compliance' means, how we may be erroneously interpreting healthcare data and what this entails for the healthcare consumer. The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information, visit www.ausmed.com.au.

Healthcare professions pride themselves on the use of an evidence-based framework to inform their practice. Decisions are grounded in evidence that has been obtained through rigorous research and vetted by means of a robust process of peer review and editorial scrutiny before it is disseminated for use. But what would you do if some of the evidence that informs your practice is, in fact, 'dirty'? That is, the research data, whilst entirely valid, was obtained by completely unethical means? In this episode, I’m going to explore this question in depth and investigate how one set of datum from a series of shocking WWII Nazi human experiments snuck its way back into the contemporary research literature and, in fact, informs some of our current clinical practices.
The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information and healthcare resources, visit www.ausmed.com.au.

In January of 2019, the World Health Organization declared vaccine hesitancy to be one of the top ten existential threats to the human race, yet since that declaration, and despite millions of dollars being ploughed into combatting the flow of vaccine misinformation, the online presence of the anti-vax community has grown by an incredible 500% over the last 12 months. So what-the-Edward-Jenner is going on? In this episode, I’m going to examine the reasons behind this exponential rise of anti-vax sentiment, how the medical profession itself has inadvertently provided the fuel for its growth, and how this is pushing us at supersonic speed towards a global healthcare disaster. The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information and healthcare resources, visit www.ausmed.com.au.

Over the past 23 years, there have been 19 major inquiries, investigations and reviews into aged care services in Australia, culminating in the current Royal Commission. Every one of those has told us – as future inquiries, investigations and reviews will continue to tell us - that we really, really need to talk about aged care.

But we don’t. And we won’t. And we probably never will.

In this episode, Darren Wake talks about just how dysfunctional residential aged care is in Australia and why there is one elephant in the room that everyone is too embarrassed to confront. It’s an issue that, by itself, creates the largest single barrier to a constructive and productive dialogue about aged care services across the country, both now, and in the future.

And if you’ve worked in aged care, you already know what it is.

The Handover, brought to you by Ausmed. For more information and healthcare resources, visit www.ausmed.com.au.

In 2020 we welcome the return of The Handover podcast with a brand new season!

I'm your host, Darren Wake, and every two weeks I'm going to bring you something new about health, healthcare and the human body.

This season, The Handover will be extremely wide-ranging, if not totally free-range, experimental and eclectic.

For more information and helpful healthcare resources, visit www.ausmed.com.au. 

(Previous seasons' episodes of The Handover are available to Ausmed subscribers, only at www.ausmed.com.au.)