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. You mean need to import this RSS feed into other apps, and it's an easy page to search for thematic terms and podcasts that might interest you. 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, or even by starting a conversation at the RACP Online Community forum. 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
Ep77: Deciding with Children
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?
Ep76: Making Amends- Medical Injury Part 3
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.
Ep75: Feeling Guilty- Medical Injury Part 2
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.
Ep74: Saying Sorry- Medical Injury Part 1
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.
Ep73: Communicating a Pandemic
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.
Ep72: Modelling a Pandemic—Congress 2021
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.
Ep70: Zeroing in on “the renal troponin”
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.
Ep69: Gendered Medicine—Funding and Research
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?
Ep68: Gendered Medicine- Pain
Gender can be considered a social determinant of health given the taboos and stereotypes around women's health. We discuss the responsibility Medicine has in supporting more equitable outcomes.