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Pomegranate Health

Pomegranate Health

Welcome to Pomegranate Health, a podcast about the culture of medicine. You’ll hear clinicians, academics and advocates grapple with some big questions. How to make difficult clinical and ethical decisions free from cognitive bias. How to improve communication with patients and peers. How to deliver healthcare with efficiency and equity.

Fellows of the RACP can log time spent listening towards their CPD. Basic Physician Trainees will find the Case Report series a useful model for presentation of long-cases at their clinical examinations.

This is also the home of IMJ On-Air, where authors from the College's Internal Medicine Journal present their work. Meanwhile, the Journal Club episodes invite RACP researchers published in other academic journals to showcase their work.

Please add to the discussion in the comments section for each episode and send any feedback or ideas to podcast@racp.edu.au

Latest episodes

Ep67: Boosting Public Health in the Indo-Pacific

Australia’s Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security provides development assistance to health services as far flung as Fiji, Cambodia and Timor L’Este. Its mission is always tailored to the needs of the development partner, and had to adapt quickly with the sudden demands of the COVID-19.

Ep66: Gendered Medicine- Heart Disease

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for women in most of the industrialized world. Women who suffer from this die at significantly higher rates than men because of discrepancies in the quality of care they receive. In this episode we explore the subtle biases that nudge male and female patients down different health pathways.

Ep65: A New Script for Global Public Health

Intellectual property law has influenced pharmaceutical development and marketing for at least 25 years ago. But it’s not clear whether this is actually the best model for stimulating innovation and addressing the most important global health problems. Closer to home, we also discuss a solution to the jurisdictional conflicts in responding to the pandemic.

Ep64: Big Pharma and the People’s Vaccine

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a frenzy of vaccine development never seen before, but also examples of hoarding, price hikes and vaccine nationalism. We discuss where the intellectual property rules have come from and where exceptions are sometimes made for public health emergencies.

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. In this podcast we examine the role and responsibilities it shares with its member states and where the straining points have been.

Ep62: Essential Ethics in Adolescent Health

Two more case studies from the Essential Ethics podcast tackling the question of when refusal of treatment should or shouldn’t be accepted by a medical team, and how much autonomy does an adolescent have. Featuring clinicians from the oncology department at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne.

Ep61: Delirium Part 2- Prevention and Management

Delirium can be precipirated by a host of environmental triggers that are highly modifiable. Anything that contributes to a person’s disorientation and discomfort can increase the likelihood of a delirium episode. While a lot of these factors are compounded in elderly and frail patients, delirium can be reversed in a majority of patients by non-pharmacological means.

Ep60: Delirium Part 1- Detection and Causes

Delirium is an acute disturbance of consciousness, attention, cognition or perception. It’s 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 it’s notoriously underdiagnosed, so in this episode we talk about the presentations and detection of delirium. We also go through some of the medical and iatrogenic risk factors.

Ep59: Essential Ethics in Paediatrics

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 way to that of the medical professionals? These questions and more are discussed in two case studies from the Essential Ethics podcast, produced within the Children's Bioethics Centre in Melbourne.

Ep58: Billing Part 2—Compliance and the Free Market

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 health system over 2 billion dollars annually. The vast majority of this comes down to lack of education about the MBS. Department of Health has an elaborate, and sometimes controversial way of identifying misuse of the system. Government regulation also influences the market for private medical fees as does supply and demand of certain specialties.

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