The three word mission statement of the RACP is Educate - Advocate – Innovate. In this podcast we hear from physicians who have taken up a cause, and how the College can help amplify the message.

When can a child be considered to have autonomy to make healthcare decisions for themselves? How should responsibility for difficult decisions be shared between the patients, the parents and clinicians? And is it possible to minimise the moral injury when the wishes of the patient need to be over-ruled?

In Australia, litigation is the only way for victims to get financial compensation for the medical injury. New Zealand, by contrast, operates a no-fault scheme where the costs of hardship and ongoing care are born by the government for many harms incurred in healthcare.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to incident disclosure is culture of medicine itself. This podcast explores the guilt that can come about from having caused harm, and the cognitive dissonance this creates in one’s professional identity as a healer.

Medical injury occurs at a rate of about 12 per cent of admissions but is often not disclosed to patients or their families. This podcast explores why practitioners may be fearful of admitting to errors and how victims want the health system to make amends.

There are many layers of public health interventions that can reduce the rate of transmission of the novel coronavirus but you need you need the community on board to make a significant impact. In this podcast we discuss the challenges and strategies around messaging to the community during a time of such high anxiety.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how hard it is to take decisions affecting the lives of millions when there is so little evidence to go on. Models of viral spread and interventions to mitigate these have become everyday discussion points, but few people understand how hard these are to put together.

This podcast draws on the experience of some very committed Victorian clinicians; the challenges and the the lessons learned about practical implementation of VAD over the last two years.

After over a two decades of research, commercial assays now exist that can predict onset of acute kidney injury in at-risk patients. But many questions remains as whether these are specific enough to be useful at point of care, and whether we have the interventions to respond to the information they provide.

It’s been said that the health needs of women are undervalued by our fee-for-service model, down to individual item numbers in the Medicare Benefits Schedule. There’s also evidence that disease predominantly experienced by females receive less research investment. Is this blatant sexism or a symptom of other structural imbalance? And what do we do about it?