BJOG
August 2025
Objective: To assess the impact of high-dose folic acid supplementation (4.0-5.1 mg), started between 8 and 16 weeks of gestation and continued until delivery, on social impairments associated with Autism Spectrum Disorders, deficiencies in executive function, and emotional and behavioural problems in children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: We aimed to compare health outcomes and costs in standard public maternity care compared to private obstetric-led maternity care.
Design: Observational study with linked administrative data.
Setting: Australian maternity care.
BMJ Open
May 2025
Introduction: Excessive bleeding after childbirth (postpartum haemorrhage, PPH) affects 5% of births and causes 75 000 maternal deaths worldwide annually. It is the leading cause of direct maternal deaths globally and continues to be a major cause of mortality in the UK. Oxytocin is the standard first-line treatment for atonic PPH.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe haemorrhage of psychiatrists from the NSW state-funded mental health system parallels losses throughout Australia, and internationally. The lack of workforce cripples the capacity to provide adequate care. There has been persistently neglectful under-resourcing of the care of people with severe mental illness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Pregnancy is associated with physiological changes that can alter the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profile of many drugs. Low-dose aspirin is used for preeclampsia prevention; however, aspirin's pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are poorly studied in pregnant women.
Objective: The aim of this study was to compare the pharmacodynamics of 2 common doses of aspirin (75 and 150 mg) used for preeclampsia prevention in high-risk women by examining their effect on thromboxane B inhibition.
Australas Psychiatry
December 2024
There are many identified challenges for mental healthcare services in Australia and New Zealand including design, infrastructure and workforce shortfalls. In the 2024 RANZCP Workforce Report over 75% of trainees and psychiatrists endorsed symptoms of burnout, and over 80% reported that workforce shortages contributed. There is a need for effective leadership to reform and renew healthcare services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Specialised mental healthcare delivery is highly labour intensive, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated workforce shortfalls. We explore the information on the mental healthcare labour supply in Australia from a health policy viewpoint. Our purpose is to stimulate discussion, further research and development of interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWomen with severe mental illness and pregnancy suffer substantial travails in accessing care for mental and perinatal health. Women with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia face higher risks of pregnancy and postnatal complications. Similarly, lack of access to holistic psychiatric care presents particular perils for these women and their children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAust Health Rev
August 2024
What is known about this topic? We discuss a recently published paper that alleges clinicians are causal agents of non-compliant billing of Medicare. What does this paper add? The paper's arguments are partially supported by unreferenced assertions, potential logical fallacies, inaccurate reporting of referenced material and unsubstantiated rhetoric. What are the implications for practitioners? Due to the lack of substantive evidence, it cannot be concluded that clinicians are the causal agents of non-compliant billing of Medicare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is widely recognised that over-reliance on GNSS (e.g GPS) for time synchronisation represents an acute threat to modern society, and a diversity of alternatives are required to mitigate the threat of an outage. This paper proposes a GNSS alternative using time dissemination over national scale transmission or distribution networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAustralas Psychiatry
October 2023
Objective: Contemporary medical education lacks a strong focus on health economics which guides major decisions in private and public health services. We briefly outline the rationale, guiding principles, main analytic methods, and a suggested framework for health economics education in psychiatry.
Conclusions: Health economics aims to improve the efficiency of healthcare.
The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to longstanding structural shortfalls in the supply of healthcare services in high-income countries, including Australia. These impacts are reflected in Australian public hospital key performance indicators for acute care, elective surgery and hospital exit block. The challenges occur in the context of increased demand following the suspension of a range of healthcare services during the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAust Health Rev
April 2023
What is known about the topic? When assessing real growth in costs, it is important to adjust for inflation through indexation to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The change in prices or costs over time can be calculated in constant currency amounts by adjusting by a ratio of the CPI in the year of interest to the CPI in the baseline year. What does this paper add? Rosenberg et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Technol Assess
December 2023
Background: In women with late preterm pre-eclampsia (i.e. at 34 to 36 weeks' gestation), the optimal delivery time is unclear because limitation of maternal-fetal disease progression needs to be balanced against infant complications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 global pandemic has triggered one of the greatest economic shocks in a century. Effective COVID-19 vaccines have been developed, but a proportion of people either are hesitant or refuse to be vaccinated, facilitated by a global misinformation campaign. If 'herd immunity' cannot be achieved, there is potential not only for ongoing surges in infection, but also for development of new strains of the virus that could evade vaccines and precipitate further health and economic crises.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPilot Feasibility Stud
July 2022
Background: As part of the internal pilot of the EMPOWER trial investigating the second-line antiemetic therapies in severe emesis in pregnancy ( https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN16924692 ), a qualitative study of women's views was carried out, to improve our understanding of why women did, or did not, consent to participation in the trial.
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