Publications by authors named "Louisa Walsh"

Background: Changes in Australian health policies and public funding models have increased the demand for private dietetics services over the past two decades. Limited available workforce data indicate that over half of the Australian dietetics workforce works in private practice at some level, with approximately 30%-50% of dietitians now entering private practice as new graduates. These changes in the sector have implications for dietetics workforce development.

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Aim: Private practice is one of the most rapidly growing, but under-researched employment sectors for graduate dietitians in Australia, limiting evidence-based workforce development. This scoping review examines existing international literature to gain an understanding of the current private practice workforce size, distribution, demography and workforce development considerations, including competencies, supply and demand, remuneration and professional development activities.

Methods: The databases MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, EMCARE, PsycInfo (Ovid) and grey literature were systematically searched in August 2023 using key search terms to identify studies for inclusion.

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Introduction: Australia has experienced sustained reductions in hepatitis C testing and treatment and may miss its 2030 elimination targets. Addressing gaps in community-based hepatitis C prescribing in priority settings that did not have, or did not prioritise, hepatitis C testing and treatment care pathways is critical.

Methods: The Tasmanian Eliminate Hepatitis C Australia Outreach Project delivered a nurse-led outreach model of care servicing hepatitis C priority populations in the community through the Tasmanian Statewide Sexual Health Service, supported by the Eliminating Hepatitis C Australia partnership.

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Background: This review is an update of a rapid review undertaken in 2020 to identify relevant, feasible and effective communication approaches to promote acceptance, uptake and adherence to physical distancing measures for COVID-19 prevention and control. The rapid review was published when little was known about transmission, treatment or future vaccination, and when physical distancing measures (isolation, quarantine, contact tracing, crowd avoidance, work and school measures) were the cornerstone of public health responses globally. This updated review includes more recent evidence to extend what we know about effective pandemic public health communication.

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Background: Partnering with consumers in the planning, delivery and evaluation of health services is an essential component of person-centred care. There are many ways to partner with consumers to improve health services, including formal group partnerships (such as committees, boards or steering groups). However, consumers' and health providers' views and experiences of formal group partnerships remain unclear.

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Background: Health organisations and stakeholders use social media for a range of functions, including engaging stakeholders in the design and quality improvement (QI) of services. Social media may help overcome some of the limitations of traditional stakeholder engagement methods. This scoping review explores the benefits, risks, barriers and enablers for using social media as a tool for stakeholder engagement in health service design and QI.

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Background: Social media can be used to engage consumers in hospital service design and quality improvement (QI) activities, however its uptake may be limited by a lack of guidance to support implementation. This article presents the perceived barriers and enablers in using social media for consumer engagement derived from an interview study with public hospital stakeholders.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian hospital service providers and consumer representatives.

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Background: Health services have traditionally been developed to focus on specific diseases or medical specialties. Involving consumers as partners in planning, delivering and evaluating health services may lead to services that are person-centred and so better able to meet the needs of and provide care for individuals. Globally, governments recommend consumer involvement in healthcare decision-making at the systems level, as a strategy for promoting person-centred health services.

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Background: Engaging consumers - patients, families, carers and community members who are current or potential service users - in the planning, design, delivery, and improvement of health services is a requirement of public hospital accreditation in Australia. There is evidence of social media being used for consumer engagement in hospitals internationally, but in Australia this use is uncommon and stakeholders' experiences have not been investigated. The aim of the study was to explore the experiences and beliefs of key Australian public hospital stakeholders around using social media as a consumer engagement tool.

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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect health care systems globally, and there is widespread concern about the indirect impacts of COVID-19. Indirect impacts are caused by missed or delayed health care-not as a direct consequence of COVID-19 infections. This study gathered experiences of, and perspectives on, the indirect impacts of COVID-19 for health consumers, patients, their families and carers, and the broader community in New South Wales, Australia.

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Article Synopsis
  • Many health organizations are starting to use social media to engage with different groups (like patients and doctors) to improve health services and their designs.
  • The study looked at 40 different research papers to see how social media, especially Twitter, is used in healthcare for engaging and sharing ideas.
  • The findings showed that different groups use social media in various ways, and there are nine main models of how it's being used for health improvement activities.
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Article Synopsis
  • This study looked at how easy it is for people to understand and use the My Health Record system in Australia, especially for those who might struggle with health information.
  • The researchers checked if things have improved since their last study in 2016 and found that while there are more resources available now, many of the important features are still hard to use for some people.
  • They concluded that while some parts got better, there are still issues that need fixing so everyone can access My Health Record easily, especially people who find health topics confusing.
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Background: Early childhood vaccination is an essential global public health practice that saves two to three million lives each year, but many children do not receive all the recommended vaccines. To achieve and maintain appropriate coverage rates, vaccination programmes rely on people having sufficient awareness and acceptance of vaccines.Face-to-face information or educational interventions are widely used to help parents understand why vaccines are important; explain where, how and when to access services; and address hesitancy and concerns about vaccine safety or efficacy.

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Background: My Health Record is Australia's electronic personal health record system, which was introduced in July 2012. As of August 2017, approximately 21 percent of Australia's total population was registered to use My Health Record. Internationally, usability issues have been shown to negatively influence the uptake and use of electronic health record systems, and this scenario may particularly affect people who have low e-health literacy.

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Background: Low health literacy, low levels of positive belief and privacy and security concerns have been identified as a significant barrier to personal electronic health record uptake and use. An important tool for overcoming these barriers is the consumer-facing information which accompanies the system. My Health Record (MyHR) is the Australian national e-health record system, for which a large suite of online resources exists to facilitate consumer registration and use.

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Consumer involvement in the design and delivery of their healthcare is an integral strategy to ensure that health services and systems meet consumers' needs. This is also true for the design and delivery of Models of Care. This chapter presents the identified healthcare needs of people with musculoskeletal conditions and focuses on the current systematic review evidence for consumer involvement interventions in musculoskeletal Models of Care across the micro, meso and macro levels of healthcare.

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In the last 5 years, regulatory agencies and drug monitoring centres have been developing computerised data-mining methods to better identify reporting relationships in spontaneous reporting databases that could signal possible adverse drug reactions. At present, there are no guidelines or standards for the use of these methods in routine pharmaco-vigilance. In 2003, a group of statisticians, pharmaco-epidemiologists and pharmaco-vigilance professionals from the pharmaceutical industry and the US FDA formed the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America-FDA Collaborative Working Group on Safety Evaluation Tools to review best practices for the use of these methods.

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Data mining is receiving considerable attention as a tool for pharmacovigilance and is generating many perspectives on its uses. This paper presents four concepts that have appeared in various professional venues and represent potential sources of misunderstanding and/or entail extended discussions: (i) data mining algorithms are unvalidated; (ii) data mining algorithms allow data miners to objectively screen spontaneous report data; (iii) mathematically more complex Bayesian algorithms are superior to frequentist algorithms; and (iv) data mining algorithms are not just for hypothesis generation. Key points for a balanced perspective are that: (i) validation exercises have been done but lack a gold standard for comparison and are complicated by numerous nuances and pitfalls in the deployment of data mining algorithms.

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A principle concern of pharmacovigilance is the timely detection of adverse drug reactions that are novel by virtue of their clinical nature, severity and/or frequency. The cornerstone of this process is the scientific acumen of the pharmacovigilance domain expert. There is understandably an interest in developing database screening tools to assist human reviewers in identifying associations worthy of further investigation (i.

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