Publications by authors named "Rix E"

Cultural safety is increasingly recognised as imperative to delivering accessible and acceptable healthcare for First Nations Peoples within Australia and in similar colonised countries. A literature review undertaken to inform the inaugural Caring for Australians with Renal Insufficiency (CARI) guidelines for clinically and culturally safe kidney care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples revealed a timeline of the emergence of culturally safe kidney care in Australia. Thirty years ago, kidney care literature was purely biomedically focused, with culture, family and community viewed as potential barriers to patient 'compliance' with treatment.

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The inclusion of Indigenous cultures, known as the cultural determinants of health, in healthcare policy and health professional education accreditation and registration requirements, is increasingly being recognised as imperative for improving the appalling health and well-being of Indigenous Australians. These inclusions are a strengths-based response to tackling the inequities in Indigenous Australians' health relative to the general population. However, conceptualising the cultural determinants of health in healthcare practice has its contextual challenges, and gaps in implementation evidence are apparent.

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Indigenous nurse scholars across nations colonised by Europeans articulate the need for accomplices (as opposed to mere performative allies) to work alongside them and support their ongoing struggle for health equity and respect and to prioritise and promote culturally safe healthcare. Although cultural safety is now being mandated in nursing codes of practice as a strategy to address racism in healthcare, it is important that white nurse educators have a comprehensive understanding about cultural safety and the pedagogical skills needed to teach it to undergraduate nurses. We open this article with stories of our journeys as two white nurses in becoming accomplices and working alongside Indigenous Peoples, as patients and colleagues.

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Article Synopsis
  • First Nations Australians show resilience despite the lasting impacts of colonization, which have led to higher rates of chronic kidney disease (CKD) among this population.
  • Community consultations have shaped guidelines that prioritize local knowledge and address issues such as institutional racism, cultural safety, and the need for increased family and community involvement in healthcare.
  • The guidelines recommend earlier screening for CKD, more timely referrals to specialists, and emphasize the importance of community engagement and access to care in rural areas to improve kidney health outcomes.
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: Cultural safety is mandated for Australian nursing practice and education. Cultural safety privileges the knowledge of the client, who determines whether healthcare is culturally safe. Understanding and learning cultural safety requires critical self-reflection to expose clinicians' assumptions, unconscious biases, beliefs and actions, and their impact on clients.

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Disproportional morbidity and mortality experienced by ethnic minorities in the UK have been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 'Black Lives Matter' movement has exposed structural racism's contribution to these health inequities. 'Cultural Safety', an antiracist, decolonising and educational innovation originating in New Zealand, has been adopted in Australia.

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Despite decades of evidence showing that institutional and interpersonal racism serve as significant barriers to accessible healthcare for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, attempts to address this systemic problem still fall short. The social determinants of health are particularly poignant given the socio-political-economic history of invasion, colonisation, and subsequent entrenchment of racialised practices in the Australian healthcare landscape. Embedded within Euro-centric, bio-medical discourses, Western dominated healthcare processes can erase significant cultural and historical contexts and unwittingly reproduce unsafe practices.

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Developing and targeting interventions to reduce hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive (ACS) chronic conditions for older people is a key focus for improvement of the health system. To do this, an understanding of any modifiable factors that may contribute to such admissions is needed. To date, the literature on ACS admissions has rarely included the patient perspective.

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Background: Potentially preventable hospital admission (an admission deemed to be potentially preventable given appropriate care in the community-based healthcare setting) has been a topic of international research attention for almost three decades. Recently this has been largely driven by the imperative to reduce ever-increasing unplanned hospital admissions. However, identifying potentially preventable admissions is difficult.

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Introduction: Researchers are challenged to publish or perish. A range of barriers to writing can result in sub-optimal productivity, particularly for early career researchers. Researchers in rural areas may face additional challenges of distance and limited access to colleagues.

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Objectives: Australian Aboriginal people have at least eight times the incidence of end-stage kidney disease, requiring dialysis, as the non-Aboriginal population. Provision of health services to rural Aboriginal people with renal disease is challenging due to barriers to access and cultural differences. We aimed to describe the experiences of Aboriginal people receiving haemodialysis in rural Australia, to inform strategies for improving renal services.

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Chronic kidney disease has a higher prevalence in Indigenous populations globally. The incidence of end-stage kidney disease in Australian Aboriginal people is eight times higher than non-Aboriginal Australians. Providing services to rural and remote Aboriginal people with chronic disease is challenging because of access and cultural differences.

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Context: Reflexivity is crucial for non-Aboriginal researchers working with Aboriginal people. This article describes a process of 'reflexive practice' undertaken by a white clinician/researcher while working with Aboriginal people. The clinician/researcher elicited Aboriginal people's experience of being haemodialysis recipients in rural Australia and their perceptions of their disease and treatment.

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Objective: Providing services to rural dwelling minority cultural groups with serious chronic disease is challenging due to access to care and cultural differences. This study aimed to describe service providers' perspectives on health services delivery for Aboriginal people receiving haemodialysis for end-stage kidney disease in rural Australia.

Design: Semistructured interviews, thematic analysis

Setting: A health district in rural New South Wales, Australia

Participants: Using purposive sampling, 29 renal and allied service providers were recruited, including nephrologists, renal nurses, community nurses, Aboriginal health workers, social workers and managers.

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Vascular disease is a leading cause of death and disability. While it is preventable, little is known about the feasibility or acceptability of implementing interventions to prevent vascular disease in Australian primary health care. We conducted a cluster randomised controlled trial assessing prevention of vascular disease in patients aged 40-65 by providing a lifestyle modification program in general practice.

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Oral anticoagulation is an effective prophylactic or treatment measure for many indications (Baglin et al, 2005). Most patients on oral anticoagulant therapy (OAT) take the drug warfarin. This article discusses how OAT is monitored, the factors affecting the stability and control of anticoagulation, and the importance of educating patients who are on OAT.

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Background: Damage control surgery (DCS) and treatment of abdominal compartment syndrome have had major impacts on care of the severely injured. The objective of this study was to see whether advances in critical care, DCS, and recognition of abdominal compartment syndrome have improved survival from penetrating abdominal injury (PAI).

Methods: The care of 250 consecutive patients requiring laparotomy for PAI (1997-2000) was reviewed retrospectively.

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While gamma/delta T cells are involved in host defense and immunopathology in a variety of infectious diseases, their precise role is not yet clearly defined. In the absence of gamma/delta T cells, mice die after infection with a dose of Listeria monocytogenes that is not lethal in immunologically intact animals. Morbidity might result from insufficient levels of cytokines normally produced by gamma/delta T cells or conversely from an excess of cytokines due to a lack of down-regulation of the inflammatory response in the absence of gamma/delta T cells.

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A 44-year-old woman sustained massive pulmonary embolization from a deep leg-vein thrombosis. She was given 70 mg recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) by continuous intravenous drip over two hours. Before this treatment perfusion scintigraphy had demonstrated complete absence of flow in the right lung due to embolic occlusion of the central hilar vessels.

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Extracellular calcium concentration is an important regulator of calcitonin secretion. We used primary cell cultures of human medullary thyroid carcinoma to study the role of voltage dependent calcium channels for stimulus secretion coupling. Increasing extracellular calcium concentration (1.

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Katacalcin (KC) is situated on the C-terminal side of the procalcitonin molecule and is cleaved like calcitonin (CT) from this precursor peptide. Serum levels of KC were measured in 22 patients with C-cell carcinoma with a specific and sensitive radioimmunoassay (normal range, less than 0.1-0.

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We investigated whether chronic subcutaneous infusion of neurotensin during 14 days would affect pancreatic and gastric growth of rats. In another experiment, neurotensin (836 pmol/kg) was injected intraperitoneally three times a day for three days in 12 rats. Thereafter, pancreatic DNA and in vitro incorporation of 3H-thymidine into pancreatic DNA was determined.

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