The future of our health system depends on recruiting and retaining passionate and highly skilled health-care workers. It’s essential to build work environments where they feel supported and safe.
A strong primary care system keeps patients away from emergency departments and helps patients self-manage illnesses. But Ontario’s plan to ease pressure on emergency rooms ignores family medicine.
Searching symptoms online has become so common there is a name for the condition of health anxiety induced by self-diagnosis on the internet: Cyberchondria.
Voluntary medical societies have important roles in professional education and advocacy for doctors and patients, but there is need for transparency about relationships with pharma and health industry.
Medical schools need long-term equity planning and built-in accountability measures in order to help realize a larger vision of anti-racist and inclusive health care.
The pathway for foreign doctors to practise in New Zealand is neither easy nor very fair, meaning an over-stretched health system is missing out on valuable expertise.
Although demanding, disruptive and violent patients are a major contributor to physician burnout, solutions to address this increasing problem are not a priority.
Less than half of Canadians can see their doctor same-day, and millions don’t even have a family doctor. Improving access to care means providing doctors with the support they need to focus on patients.
The decisions of medical health-care professionals like doctors and nurse practitioners are more legally significant than ever before since they are determining vaccination exemptions.
It’s human nature to unconsciously rely on quick rules to help make spur-of-the-moment decisions. New research finds physicians use these shortcuts, too, which can be bad news for some patients.
Rates of burnout have increased alarmingly among health-care workers during the pandemic. Unless the system provides more support to its already depleted workforce, staff shortages may get worse.
Because little scientific evidence exists for trans medical treatments, doctors are often wary when working with trans people, even if they realize it’s in the patients’ best interests to do so.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne