Effective intercultural communication between First Nations peoples and healthcare providers in colonised countries is required to deliver equitable healthcare and improve patient experiences and health outcomes. This paper presents First Nations peoples' perspectives and proposed solutions to problematic communication experiences at Royal Darwin Hospital in northern Australia. The study's methodological foundations comprise decolonising principles rooted in Critical Race Theory, Freirean pedagogy, and cultural safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: First Nations peoples in colonised countries often feel culturally unsafe in hospitals, leading to high self-discharge rates, psychological distress and premature death. To address racism in healthcare, institutions have promised to deliver cultural safety training but there is limited evidence on how to teach cultural safety. To that end, we created Ask the Specialist Plus: a training program that focuses on improving healthcare providers intercultural communication skills to improve cultural safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Communicate Study is a partnership project which aims to transform the culture of healthcare systems to achieve excellence in culturally safe care for First Nations people. It responds to the ongoing impact of colonisation which results in First Nations peoples experiencing adverse outcomes of hospitalisation in Australia's Northern Territory. In this setting, the majority of healthcare users are First Nations peoples, but the majority of healthcare providers are not.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Australia's Northern Territory (NT) most people who access health services are Aboriginal and most healthcare providers are non-Indigenous; many providers struggle to deliver culturally competent care. Cultural awareness training is offered however, dissatisfaction exists with the limited scope of training and the face-to-face or online delivery format. Therefore, we developed and evaluated , a cultural education podcast in which Aboriginal leaders of Larrakia, Tiwi and Yolŋu nations, known as the , answer doctors' questions about working with Aboriginal patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) embrace Facebook as an organisational tool to share positive stories, which counter the negative narrative surrounding Aboriginal issues. However, the Facebook algorithm prioritises posts on personal pages over organisations. To take advantage of the algorithm, this project paid three Yolŋu employees of a north-east Arnhem Land ACCHS to share quit smoking messages on their personal Facebook pages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCyanoacrylate glue (Superglue) has the ability to bond a variety of surfaces firmly within seconds of use. Its application into the external ear canal (EAC) is a challenging problem for clinicians. We present 3 case reports of patients who presented at our hospital with superglue in their EACs: 1 was accidental, 1 was iatrogenic, and 1 was intentional.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Laryngol Otol
September 2011
Objective: To report a rare case of a symptomatic malleo-incudal osteoma, and to highlight the difficulties in making the clinical diagnosis.
Method: Case report and literature review.
Results: Malleo-incudal osteoma is a rare cause of unilateral conductive hearing loss.
Necrotizing otitis externa is a necrotizing osteomyelitis of the skull base that predominantly affects diabetic and immunocompromised patients. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most frequently implicated organism. Patients present with severe otalgia, otorrhoea with or without facial palsy, or rarely, facial pain as a symptomatic feature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPartial middle turbinate avulsion is a rare complication of nasotracheal intubation. Patients usually experience a brisk hemorrhage at the time of injury. Postoperatively, some patients develop a unilateral nasal obstruction, while others are asymptomatic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper describes the Institute of Medicine's (IOM's) eight-year experiment in examining cancer policy issues through the National Cancer Policy Board and more recently through the early phases of the National Cancer Policy Forum. Both were primarily funded by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forum identifies and explores issues but, unlike the board, does not author IOM advisory reports.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKennedy Inst Ethics J
March 1998
In December 1997, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on medical and ethical issues in the procurement of non-heart-beating organ donors. This report had been requested in May 1997 by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). We will here describe the genesis of the IOM report, the medical and moral concerns that led the DHHS to sponsor it, the process of producing it, and its conclusions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Gen Psychiatry
April 1998
Federal support of graduate medical education (GME) has been accepted as an intrinsic ingredient of the Medicare program since that program's inception. Streams of clinical income generated by teaching hospitals, medical faculty practice plans, Medicaid, and other state and federal sources have also made important contributions to GME. Although it is difficult to ascribe legislative intent precisely, Medicare funding seems to have been based on a 2-fold assumption: that GME was socially beneficial and that there were legitimate costs to teaching hospitals associated with their educational missions, even though such costs were hard to identify specifically.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOtitis media with effusion (OME) is a common condition in paediatric ENT practice. Whilst surgical management is in many cases the mainstay of treatment for resistant OME, the use of antibiotics has been advocated by some authorities. Over one quarter of middle ear effusions analysed in this study contained potentially pathogenic bacteria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Laryngol Otol
June 1995
Impaction of a fish bone at the base of tongue or the vallecula is a very common problem. Removal of the bone from these sites without a general anaesthesia can be challenging to surgeons and patients alike. Various manoeuvres to facilitate this procedure have been described, some are very successful but may require specialized instruments, while others may cause excessive discomfort to the patients and even inadvertent dislodgement of the bone.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntibodies to type II collagen have been reported by some authors to be raised in patients with Ménière's disease. In this study the antibody levels to type I and II collagen have been measured in 37 patients with Ménière's disease and 20 controls, using a solid-phase, double-antibody, enzyme-linked, immunoassay. No significant difference in antibody levels between the two groups was found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA case is presented of a patient undergoing pre-operative embolization of a glomus tumour who developed a facial palsy one hour after embolization. At the time of surgery it was found to be due to the embolization material (polyvinyl alcohol foam) blocking the stylomastoid artery. The blood supply of glomus tumours and the variations in the blood supply of the facial nerve are discussed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study compares the relative thermal damage caused by a surgical CO2 laser and the Erbium:YAG laser when used to incise the human vocal fold in vitro. Results show that charring is completely eliminated when using the Erbium:YAG laser. The depth of coagulative necrosis adjacent to an incision is reduced from 510 microns (+/- 75) using the CO2 laser to 23 microns (+/- 12) using the Ebrium:YAG laser and at the base is reduced from 125 microns (+/- 45) using the CO2 laser to 12 microns (+/- 8) using the Erbium:YAG laser.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe deleterious effects of parental smoking on the upper respiratory tracts of children are becoming increasingly recognized. This study examines the effect of parental smoking on the frequency of tonsillitis and incidence of tonsillectomy in children. A group of children being admitted for tonsillectomy and a control group of children from an orthoptic clinic were studied.
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