Internal medicine journal
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Internal medicine journal · Sep 2021
Can an online mental health training program improve physician supervisors' behaviour towards trainees?
Physician trainees have elevated rates of psychological distress, mental disorders and suicide. Physician supervisors can support the mental health needs of trainees. ⋯ This online mental health training programme for physician supervisors was feasible and associated with improved confidence and behaviour to support the mental health needs of trainees they supervised.
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The predictive ability and efficiency of inpatient harm screening tools is unclear. We performed a retrospective analysis of approximately 25 000 people admitted to our hospital in 2019. We found that the discriminatory ability of the harm screening tools was at best moderate and could be attributed to one or two questions that overlapped with each other in the harm they predicted.
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Internal medicine journal · Sep 2021
ABO and Rhesus D blood groups in the Northern Territory of Australia.
There are no contemporary published data on the frequency of the ABO and Rhesus D (RhD) blood groups in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia, particularly for the large Aboriginal population. ⋯ We found a significant difference in ABO and RhD blood groups between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals in the NT (P < 0.001). These findings will aid transfusion inventory management, allowing us to plan supply of blood products and reduce waste.
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Internal medicine journal · Sep 2021
Practical ethical challenges and moral distress among staff in a hospital COVID-19 screening service.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented disruptions to established models of healthcare and healthcare delivery, creating a host of new ethical challenges for healthcare institutions, their leadership and their staff. Hospitals and other large organisations have an obligation to understand and recognise the downstream effects that highly unusual situations and professionally demanding policy may have on workers tasked with its implementation, in order to institute risk-mitigation strategies and provide additional support where required. In our experience, targeted ethics-based forums that provide a non-confrontational platform to discuss and explore the ethical dilemmas that may have arisen have been well received, and can also serve as useful and immediate feedback mechanisms to managers and leadership. Using two case illustrations, this article examines some of the ethical challenges and dilemmas faced by these staff, based on discussions of shared experience during a clinical ethics forum for the Screening Clinic staff at Austin Health, Melbourne, Victoria.