Chronic Pain: Empathy for Patients

Doctors and other health professionals have been urged to have greater awareness of their own potential to inadvertently contribute to the stigmatisation of their chronic pain patients through negative empathy. Stigmatization of Patients with Chronic Pain: The Extinction of Empathy is a paper published recently in the journal Pain Medicine.  It warns health professionals they could be unintentionally contributing to the negative community stereotypes of chronic pain sufferers and can be challenged when confronted with a clinical problem, such as chronic pain, that they cannot readily understand.

Pain Medicine is the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and of the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists and of the International Spine Intervention Society. Contact your library to access the fulltext of this article. 

Pain Medicine; Volume 12, Issue 11, November 2011, Pages: 1637–1643, Milton Cohen, John Quintner, David Buchanan, Mandy Nielsen and Lynette Guy

Brain trauma guidelines

The Brain Trauma Foundation has made freely available their Guidelines on traumatic brain injury and coma, as well as checklists and videos on concussion. The goal of the BTF is to better educate coaches, nurses, athletes, parents and all citizens about the importance of recognizing concussions and taking the appropriate steps to ensure people receive appropriate care. Research has proven that all brain damage does not occur at the moment of impact but rather evolves over the ensuing hours and days after the initial injury, due to brain swelling and inadequate oxygen and blood flow to the injured brain.

Australian Health Review free articles

The Australian Health Review, which is the journal of the Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association, is offering open access to the following articles:

• The status of Australian nurse practitioners : the second national census
• Investing in big ideas: utilisation and cost of Medicare Allied Health services in Australia under the Chronic Disease Management initiative in primary care
• The efficient price: an opportunity for funding reform
• Rebuilding community: considerations for policy makers in the wake of the 2011 Queensland floods

Worker representation and participation guide

The Worker Representation and Participation Guide published by Safe Work Australia, provides information on the representation and participation of workers in health and safety matters at the workplace, as well as guidance on resolving health and safety issues. It supports one of the objects of the Work Health and Safety Act (the WHS Act), which is to provide for fair and effective workplace representation, consultation, co-operation and issue resolution in relation to work health and safety. 

Pain management in rheumatoid arthritis

This month's Cochrane Reviews include 2 on pain management in rheumatoid arthritis:

Muscle relaxants for pain management in rheumatoid arthritis

Neuromodulators for pain management in rheumatoid arthritis

Australian National Cancer Statistics 2010

The Asia-Pacific Journal of Clinical Oncology has extracted key data from the AIHW publication Cancer in Australia: an overview, 2010 and presented a summary of the key points.

Cancer has a greater overall impact on the health of Australians than any other disease group. On average, one in two Australians will develop cancer and one in five will die from it before the age of 85. This article provides an overview of statistics on cancer in Australia, focusing on incidence, mortality, survival, and participation in national cancer screening programs.

Problem gambling and health

The Australian Greens political party has published Problem Gambling and Health, which outlines the debate around gambling reform in Australia and looks at some proposed reforms through health policy. The paper aims to present some concrete options for gambling reform as well as avenues for further investigation. The authors argue that continuing reforms, with a focus on public health, should complement but not supplant existing plans to regulate poker machines and other forms of gambling. 

"The evidence is clear that problem gambling has important individual medical as well as population health aspects. If therapies exist that can be harnessed to limit the harm where population-level measures fail, they should be investigated as a matter of priority.  For these reasons, the Greens feel the debate should also include areas for further research, more funding and most importantly a national approach for identifying the best programs that can bring help to where it is needed most."

Cochrane plain language summaries

The Cochrane Summaries website aims to deliver "credible, accessible, and impartial information for patients and carers to improve understanding and promote shared decision making."  Each Cochrane summary page displays the full plain language summary and provides links to the abstract, the full review on TheCochraneLibrary.com, other reviews by the same review group and to podcasts, journal clubs, Practical Evidence About Real Life Situations (PEARLS), and news items where these are available.  It's a good place to start for an overview of a broad topic, and for referring to patients.

National Safety & Quality Health Service Standards

The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has released a new edition of their National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. 

The Standards provide a nationally consistent and uniform set of measures of safety and quality for application across a wide variety of health care services. They propose evidence-based improvement strategies to deal with gaps between current and best practice outcomes that affect a large number of patients.

Work-related injuries in Australia 2009-10

In 2009-10, 567 500 employees were injured while working but only 38 per cent of them received workers' compensation. Work-related injuries in Australia: Who did and didn't receive workers' compensation in 2009-10 is a report from Safe Work Australia which analyses the results of the Australian Bureau of Statistics Work-related Injuries Survey (Catalogue No. 6324.0) in relation to workers' compensation claims.

Some key findings of the report are that only 32% of casuals received workers’ compensation, and young workers were less likely to receive compensation compared with their older counterparts.  9% of employees were not aware of their rights to workers’ compensation or thought they were not eligible for it. The survey also found that 27% of employees who took five or more days off work due to their injury did not apply for workers’ compensation with many using sick leave instead.

New online Australian health publication

The Health Reporter, an online publication dedicated to covering Australia’s health system, was launched this week. One of the founders, journalist Michael Riley, says the publication "was born of the belief by its owners that Australia’s health system is important and large enough to have its own daily online news site producing original news content and opinion".  He sees their readership as being people from the health industry, policy makers, influencers, health innovators and those working in and around the health system.

New infection control implementation guides

The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has developed three implementation guides for Australian hospitals and organisations to support the implementation of surveillance for Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (SAB), Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) and Central Line Associated Bloodstream Infections (CLABSI). 

Each of the guides detail interpretation of the definitions, flowcharts, inclusions and exclusion for each of the surveillance topics, as well a list of examples to assist with decisions on those more difficult cases. "The guides are not intended to replace or inform clinical management of infections or patient management but to standardise how key infection data is collected and reported. All comments and feedback will be reviewed and responded to as part of the consultation process."

Implementation guide SAB Consultation Edition November 2011 
Implementation guide CDI Consultation Edition November 2011 
Implementation guide CLABSI Consultation Edition November 2011 

Cancer service providers - website

The Cancer Institute NSW has launched a new website, Canrefer, where patients and health professionals can search for a cancer or palliative care service providers in NSW. The search can be done by tumour type (eg breast) or service type (eg chemotherapy).  You can also search by postcode, where maps and contact details are provided for services within a 200 km radius of the postcode provided.

Cardiometabolic care in youth with psychosis

The media showed interest yesterday in the story of a team at the Bondi Early Psychosis Programme, who have developed a model of metabolic screening and a treatment algorithm to provide clinicians with recommendations for targeted interventions for young people experiencing their first episode of psychosis.  Their concern was with weight gain and metabolic problems associated with antipsychotic agents, and how clinicians can help prevent these problems before they happen.

The Sydney Morning Herald and ABC Radio's AM program, both ran stories about Julio De La Torre, who gained 20 kg in six months of treatment, and interviewed Jackie Curtis, the clinical leader at the Bondi centre.

You can read the abstract of the article published in Early Intervention in Psychiatry, which outlines the group's early intervention strategy, here.  To obtain the full text of the article, please contact your health library.
Jackie Curtis, Hannah D. Newall, Katherine Samaras. "The heart of the matter: cardiometabolic care in youth with psychosis". Early Intervention in Psychiatry. Article first published online: 6 JAN 2012. DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-7893.2011.00315.x

Risks of taking aspirin

An article published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine analyses randomised controlled trials of the safety and impact of aspirin on vascular and nonvascular outcomes in primary prevention. ABC radio's AM program yesterday included an interview with one of the authors of the study, Kausik Ray, who outlined the increased risk of internal bleeding connected with aspirin.

The original article is available in full text through CIAP, but please contact your health library if you have trouble accessing it:
Seghassai, S.R.K. et al.  "Effect of aspirin on vascular and nonvascular outcomes : meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials." Arch Intern Med. Published online January 9, 2012. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.628

National strategies to address dementia

By by 2050 the number of people predicted to be living with dementia worldwide will be over 100 million. This paper by Alzheimer's Australia provides an overview of a range of approaches that a selection of countries have taken to address dementia. The economic and social impact of dementia on health care systems and on family carers makes it the major health challenge of this century.

Frequent Emergency Attenders

The journal, Australian Health Review lists the most read articles in 2010/ 2011. One of the articles looks at understanding the reasons for frequent re-attendances in Emergency Departments and how this can assist in developing solutions to hospital overcrowding. The factors associated with frequently re-attending patients include older age, type of condition, unplanned return visit and season.
A number of other interesting articles relate to nurse practitioners, teleheath, end of life care and effective discharge planning. Contact your health library if you cannot access the full text version of the articles.

WHOLIS- WHO Bibliographic Database

WHOLIS is a database of all World Health Organisation (WHO) information products, with online versions. For example, if you keyword search 'evidence' and limit to 2011, you get 15 results including topics such as pre-eclampsia, induction of labour, what works in health care and engineering a learning healthcare system.

Depression, Anxiety, Psychosis in BJP this month

The British Journal of Psychiatry has a number of interesting articles in the January 2012; Vol. 200, No. 1 issue:

• Bipolar depression and treatment with antidepressants;
• Efficacy, cost-effectiveness and acceptability of self-help interventions for anxiety disorders: systematic review; and
• Preventing progression to first-episode psychosis in early initial prodromal states.

Staff can access the journal via CIAP, or check with their Hospital Library for other options.

Acute coronary syndrome

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) refers to the spectrum of acute coronary artery diseases spanning acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and unstable angina (UA). They are sudden, severe and life-threatening events. This report reviews the current algorithm for monitoring the incidence of ACS in Australia, presenting a detailed analysis of hospitalisations for AMI and UA. It also presents a range of alternative algorithms for the estimation of ACS incidence. The report "Monitoring acute coronary syndrome using national hospital data: An information paper on trends and issues" was released by AIHW in late december 2011.

Comparative Performance Monitoring

This report, Comparative Performance Monitoring Report 13th Edition, is designed to help gauge the success of different approaches undertaken by the various workers’ compensation and work health and safety authorities to reduce the incidence of work-related injury and disease.

Australian Mesothelioma Registry

The new Australian Mesothelioma Registry (AMR) is now fully operational and is receiving notification of all new cases of mesothelioma in Australia. The AMR is funded by Safe Work Australia and managed under contract by the Cancer Institute of New South Wales, in association with the Monash Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health (MonCOEH).
To find out more about the Australian Mesothelioma Registry, visit http://www.mesothelioma-australia.com. Safe Work Australia has also released Mesothelioma in Australia Incidence 1982 to 2007 Mortality 1997 to 2007.

Bullying in Schools: An Overview

This Bulletin from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in the United States examines the connection between different types and frequencies of bullying, truancy, and student achievement, and whether students' engagement in school mediates these factors.

The Bulletin is free to download.