Pomegranate Health
Welcome to Pomegranate Health, a podcast about the culture of medicine. You’ll hear clinicians, academics and advocates discuss some big questions; How can one make difficult clinical and ethical decisions free from bias? How can communication with patients and peers be improved? How can healthcare delivery be made more equitable and efficient?
This is also the home of [IMJ On-Air], where authors of the College's Internal Medicine Journal present their work. Expert advice on the current best standards for your practice.
Subscribe
Search for ‘Pomegranate Health’ in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Castbox or any podcasting app. For some apps, you may need to import . It also provides a single page you can search for topics that might interest you in specific podcast episodes. You can also sign up for an email alert when a new episode is published about once a month.
CPD
At each episode page there is a MyCPD link for Fellows to log hours of participation in a Category 1 Educational activity. Consider "levelling up" this experience into a Category 2 Performance Review activity. For example, you could organise peers into a journal club to discuss the podcast. This could be done in person, or virtually.
Reflect on aspects of the story that relate to your own practice and how it could be improved and visit MyCPD Handbook for further guidance or discussion templates.
Latest episodes
Ep96: The ergonomics of AI
AI-assisted medicine can help overcome some of the natural limits of human cognition. But it all depends on how seamlessly the machine learning devices fit in with decision-making in the clinical workflow.
Ep95: Machine Learning 101
Artificial intelligence can help interpretation of diagnostic images and perform very nuanced risk stratification based on medical records. But machine learning algorithms must be trained on good quality data to avoid error and bias from being introduced.
Ep94: Facing up to racial bias
There is systematic variation in delivery of care to culturally diverse patients in all fields of medicine. This podcast highlights the subtle biases that affect clinical decision-making by practitioners and provision of services at an institutional level.
Ep93: The rise and fall of mpox
In 2022 a sexually transmitted form of mpox virus made its way around the developed world but it had long been endemic in African countries. In this podcast we talk about the conditions that allowed new strains to evolve and the rapid community health response that reigned the global outbreak in.
Ep92: Data-driven practice improvement
The field known as Practice Analytics seeks to provide clinicians with a bird’s eye view of their case load and performance. This can draw attention to cases that stood out from the trend and help reflection and practice improvement.
[IMJ On-Air] Hyperglycaemia and COVID-19
In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, international studies showed that pre-existing diabetes conferred a significant mortality risk. Researchers have retrospectively examined electronic medical records in two Melbourne health services to find no such association.
[Guest Lecture] What we know about long COVID
ADAPT is a prospective cohort study that has been following up COVID-19 patients on various different outcome measures. This has allowed researchers to identify potential physiological and immunological signals that distinguish people who experience long COVID.
[IMJ On-Air] Making sense of HACs
Hospital-acquired complications are assumed to be preventable and to provide some metric of quality of care. But HACs may be more strongly associated with patient-related factors than they are with deviation from best practice.
[IMJ On-Air] Managing cannabinoid use in palliative care
Patients in palliative care settings may be more inclined than most to complementary and alternative medicines, including cannabinoid products. But they are also more vulnerable to side effects given impairments to their drug metabolism and clearance mechanisms.