To be clear most professors are senior in their field and usually indicates research as well as teaching, I was in a cantankerous mood this morning. But regardless Medicare needs to take access to specialist treatment seriously.

Nationalise the mines and be done with it

Yes, obviously medicare would need to increase the rebate and private insurance fees would necessarily increase(as they would now be actually paying for care rather than acting a a gatekeeping mechanism)

Rebate for a short consult with a specialist is $81.55, a long consult is $236.65.

The title professor indicates that they hold a teaching position and says nothing about their clinical skill. Plenty of specialists take the piss and leverage the title to charge ridiculous fees.

In my experience as a GP a reasonable standard fee for a specialist is around $300 with $80 back from Medicare. So yes the Medicare rebate would need to increase substantially but I doubt more than we will save when AUKUS falls through. It is within the capacity of a government with the right priorities. Also increasing the availability of public specialists would be a good companion policy.

IMO there needs to be some regulation around this, a simple measure would be to tie Medicare payments to a pricing structure(eg. a specialist can only charge the Medicare rebate + 20%).

If a specialist wants to charge more then that’s fine but the patient(or insurance) will have to pay the full cost

Exactly, it’s counter-productive to blame individuals for doing the best they know how in a broken system.

lemmy.ml is fine

The claim is that it is full of tankies. In fact what you’ll find is that instead of a small number of obnoxious teenagers with a liberal world view making obnoxious comments you’ll have a small number of obnoxious teenagers with a leftist world view making obnoxious comments.

People also claim that moderation is an issue on some communities, but hey, it’s all federated, jump across elsewhere.

Hatred for lemmy.ml is just an echo chamber quirk.

This is awesome, gunna have a showdown with my wife every morning for a while

Has anyone ever suggested engaging Chinese companies to help develop Aussie high speed rail. Seems like an obvious option.

I understand there’d be some dog whistling around it but surely there’s no actual sovereign threat if we develop local maintenance capacity.

Escalating conflict with someone with delusions of persecution is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Not knowing the system in the UK means I can’t give very good specific advice. You may be able to contact a local mental health network and there is a good chance they will know him. Let them know what is going on in as much detail as possible and suggest that he is increasingly agitated and alienating himself from the community. It sounds like this gentleman needs a conpulsory treatment order or whatever the UK equivalent is.

It’s kind of like providing a highly expensive, and logistically complex service requiring recruitment and retention of highly skilled professionals to provide an essential service to people who can’t possibly pay for it is not suited to privatization.

20/20 hindsight I guess :/

Like every new technology that is hailed as changing everything it is settling into a small handful of niches.

I use a service called Consensus which will unearth relevant academic papers to a specific clinical question, in the past this could be incredibly time consuming.

I also sometimes use a service called Heidi that uses voice recognition to document patient encounters, its quite good for a specific type of visit that suits a rigid template but 90% of my consults i have no idea why they are coming in and for those i find it not much better than writing notes myself.

Obviously for creative work it is near useless.

Why would anyone put pineapple on icecream?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue, obviously with high quality and cheap generative AI essay writing is meaningless for assessment, which is a shame because crafting an essay is an excellent exercise for thinking through a concept.

In my undergrad I wrote a lot of essays but also had a lot of small group tutorials where our contribution contributed to our grade. In medical school assessment outside of examination was almost entirely based on interaction with professors and supervisors. I’m also aware of verbal examination where a professor effectively interrogates a student to assess their knowledge which I think in undergrad settings is mostly historical but could make a comeback, oral examination is used extensively in postgraduate medical training.

For a degree to mean anything assessment needs to be not easily cheated. There are assessment methods that are available although they are less efficient.

If I were running an undergrad humanities degree I’d have essays be 10-20% of the total grade, have a brief 15-20min oral examination and tutorial participation make up the bulk of the grade. I don’t know how else a degree can mean anything.

This legend has been a fixture of election coverage as long as Ive been voting. I’ll miss you Tony

Thankyou, this is great on Windows but I’m looking for a solution on Android

I dislike this idea that government run is bad.

I recently changed my name and had to call several government agencies and found them competent and helpful every time.

I’m a GP, here’s my opinion

Can’t have eaten/drank anything for the last half hour

• in principle could alter your BP but I wouldn’t worry too much unless it’s quite a large meal

Feet flat on the floor

• yes, this is important

Lying down but sitting up

• for some purposes docs want lying/sitting/standing but for home measurements do them sitting

Back against the chair

• yes

Don’t cross your legs/ankles

• yes, feet flat on the floor

Only use your left arm

• myth, if there is a significant difference between your left and right arms there is something funky going on with your subclavian arteries

Hand facing upward/downward

• not super important

Keep your arm down/raised

• keep your arm relaxed, ideally resting on a table or desk at close to 90deg or hanging straight down

Most important is be relaxed, sit still, don’t move your arm, if you get a high reading calm yourself and take it once more then leave it.

When I’m taking a BP in clinic the most important thing I do most of the time is distract the patient from the machine with some patter as for most people the biggest confounding factor is stressing about what the reading will be, I don’t correct posture etc unless they are substantially moving their arm around.

I have taken my own BP manually, it ain’t easy

The guy at Jaycar reckons he’s never seen anything other than MC4 and it was difficult to find anything different online

Living in a tiny home, yep, on the ground on a frame