Pomegranate Health
Welcome to Pomegranate Health — a podcast about the culture of medicine.
Pomegranate Health is celebrating 10 Years of Conversations. Take a listen to this sampler of highlights from the 132 episode back catalogue covering all the themes of professional practice.
Pomegranate Health is a podcast about the culture of medicine. You'll hear insights from clinicians, researchers, and advocates as they tackle important questions — like how to make difficult clinical and ethical decisions without being influenced by bias, how to communicate better with patients and colleagues, and how to provide healthcare that’s both efficient and fair.
If you're a Fellow of the RACP, time spent listening can be counted toward your CPD hours. And if you're a Basic Physician Trainee, the [Case Report] series can help you prepare for your long case clinical exams.
This is also the home of [IMJ On-Air], featuring authors from the Internal Medicine Journal sharing their latest research. Plus, the [Journal Club] episodes give RACP researchers a space to talk through their work published in other academic journals.
We’d love to hear your thoughts — feel free to leave a comment on each episode or send feedback and ideas to podcast@racp.edu.au.
Latest episodes
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.
[IMJ On-Air] Recent advances in asthma management
This is the first episode of a new format featuring authors and editors of the Internal Medicine Journal. In this episode we have leading respiratory physicians from the Royal Melbourne Hospital presenting current best practice in the diagnosis and treatment of severe asthma.