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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.