Neither Words nor Images: Health Departments' and Hospitals' Use of Twitter During COVID-19 Had Limited Racial Representation and Content on Disparities Decreased Over Time.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the degree to which hospitals and state health departments used written content or visual representation on social media to draw attention to racial disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic. STUDY DESIGN: A retrospective analysis, using Twitter content (words and images) between May-June 2020 and May-June 2021 from organizations in the 5 states with the largest documented racial disparities in COVID-19-related mortality. MAIN OUTCOMES: All tweets and retweets (n = 6790) were coded along several lines. For May-June 2020 and May-June 2021, posts were coded as pandemic related (yes/no) and disparities related (yes/no). Open-coding methods categorized pandemic-related content into content areas, including COVID-19 education, hospital or public policy, and addressing misinformation. After self-identifying their own race/ethnicity, survey respondents (n = 100) coded pandemic-related Twitter images (n = 198) as including individuals of a similar race/ethnicity (yes/no). RESULTS: In May-June 2020, health departments posted more pandemic-related content than hospitals (µ = 204 and 71 tweets, respectively; P = .03), including more about health disparities (µ = 14.3% and 2.11% of tweets, respectively; P = .03). Between May-June 2020 and May-June 2021, content addressing health disparities decreased for both groups (47% decrease for health departments and 69% decrease for hospitals). Black respondents were more likely to feel represented in images from health departments than in those from hospitals (44.3% and 23.7% of images, respectively; P = .05). Both hospitals and health departments were more likely to use images where White respondents felt represented (hospitals = 76.1% of images; health departments = 59.7%) than images where respondents from racial/ethnic minorities felt represented (hospitals = 19.3% of images; health departments = 21.4%) ( P ≤ .001 for hospitals; P = .004 for health departments). CONCLUSIONS: Health education ideally comes in a variety of ways. Hospitals used social media for this purpose less than health departments, and neither group increased such content during the COVID-19 pandemic even as evidence of racial disparities grew.

Australian Senate Committee Report on Transvaginal Mesh Devices.

On 28 March 2018 the Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee issued its final report on transvaginal mesh devices. It found these devices have caused unnecessary physical and emotional pain and suffering to thousands of women who were not told by their doctors of the objective material risks associated with their use. The Senate Committee concurred with the description by the Public Health Association of Australia of the complications resulting from transvaginal mesh implants as constituting a serious public health issue requiring a response at both an individual and at a population level, including counselling, public education, clinical interventions and long-lasting protective mechanisms. The committee's inquiry highlighted significant shortcomings in Australia's reporting systems for medical devices, with flow-on consequences for the health system's ability to respond in a timely and effective way. Among other recommendations, the Senate Committee backed the establishment on a cost recovery basis of a national registry of high-risk implantable devices linked to a system of mandatory reporting of adverse events.