Specialty

Psychiatry: Conventionally during the acute phase of psychosis, we’ve tended to focus on short-term treatment of intense positive symptoms, hostility and agitation, and may not consider long-term treatment goals such as the improvement of negative symptoms and cognitive deficits the way we might like. In this interview, we’re talking about the importance of considering long-term treatment goals of schizophrenia when treating patients with psychosis in the acute phase.

NEW Psychiatry. Schizophrenia is a treatable condition, we have good treatments and treatment does lead to remission if we deliver the appropriate treatment. In this interview we discuss the biggest challenges that we face as a clinicians, particularly in patients with an established diagnosis of schizophrenia, as well as patient priorities and how we can balance trust in the relationship while making sure that they have the best outcome.

Psychiatry. Schizophrenia is a cyclical disease with approximately 94% of patients experiencing multiple episodes of psychosis. During periods of acute psychosis, patients may require hospitalisation, however eventually they will be discharged, and it’s during this period that transition care arrangements are very important. In this interview we discuss managing patients as they move from inpatient hospitalisation, back to community care.

Epilepsy: Drug development over 25 years has resulted in a variety of anti-epileptic drugs available to us in clinical neurology, and these utilise several different mechanisms of action (MoA). In this interview we discuss what should be considered as a part of that decision-making process when prescribing, including; MoA, the epilepsy syndrome, patient factors, and practical considerations.
33-minute listen

Epilepsy: In this interview we talk about the transition of moving from paediatric to adult care, which can be a challenging time for chronic health conditions and their caring network. Epilepsy is no exception, and poor adult psycho-social outcomes have been observed for those with paediatric onset epilepsy. Through intentional and thoughtful transition care programmes we can attempt to improve outcomes, listen to learn more.
30-minute listen

Respiratory. Asthma, superficially it seems simple to manage and mild asthma would seem simple to identify, but the more you look, the more you find there are differences and variations in the clinical expression and physiology. In this interview we discuss how to tailor treatment to each individual patient.

Respiratory. In this interview we discuss a recent study, the IMPACT study, which has looked at exacerbations and all-cause mortality differences in a head to head study comparing a number of inhaler strategies. This is an important study which answers some really important clinical questions.

Psychiatry. People with schizophrenia are well known to be at risk of metabolic syndrome, and some of the medications we use increase that risk quite markedly. Recently an audit was conducted to identify patients with schizophrenia across Australia who have metabolic problems, and look at the various interventions that might be effective for them. In this interview we discuss the key findings.

Psychiatry. When treating depression what do patients want, ‘to ameliorate depressive symptoms’ or ‘to return to normal functioning’? In this interview we discuss individualised management that takes patient’s symptoms priorities and treatment expectations into account.

Epilepsy: Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological illnesses, affecting three to four per cent of people in the developing world, and while we have a wealth of treatment options, many of these are now very old. In this interview we focus on the treatment options available to us as physicians and look at what this means to the patient and what factors we ought to consider.
30-minute listen