Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear Response in Queensland Emergency Services: A Multisite Study.

A disaster overwhelms the normal operating capacity of a health service. Minimal research exists regarding Australian hospitals' capacity to respond to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) disasters. This article, and the research supporting it, begins to fill that research gap. We conducted a descriptive quantitative study with 5 tertiary hospitals and 1 rural hospital in Queensland, Australia. The study population was the hospitals' clinical leaders for disaster preparedness. The 25-item survey consisted of questions relating to each hospital's current response capacity, physical surge capacity, and human surge capacity in response to a CBRN disaster. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The survey data indicated that over the previous 12 months, each site reached operational capacity on average 66 times and that capacity to respond and create additional emergency, intensive care, or surgical beds varied greatly across the sites. In the previous 12 months, only 2 sites reported undertaking specific hospital-wide training to manage a CBRN disaster, and 3 sites reported having suitable personal protective equipment required for hazardous materials. There was a noted shortfall in all the hospitals' capacity to respond to a radiological disaster in particular. Queensland hospitals are crucial to CBRN disaster response, and they have areas for improvement in their response and capacity to surge when compared with international preparedness benchmarks. CBRN-focused education and training must be prioritized using evidence-based training approaches to better prepare hospitals to respond following a disaster event.

SMCT - An Innovative Tool for Mental Health Analysis of Twitter Data.

Mental health conditions affect individuals, families and the wider community. It is estimated by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare that 45% of Australians will experience some form of mental health issue in their lifetime. The World Health Organization (WHO; Switzerland) has assessed that mental health is a cornerstone of overall health.Large-scale collection of data related to mental health is traditionally difficult and carried out infrequently. It is a challenge for researchers to assess seasonal, weekly or diurnal mental health trends. Social media has been demonstrated to present opportunities to extend traditional data collection techniques, particularly the expression of an individual's state of mind.The "Social Media Collection Tool" (SMCT) is a research tool developed to collect Twitter data for mental health analysis. Data collected is filtered to identify "of interest" users, allowing for cross-sectional analysis. Additionally, SMCT provides the capability to "re-poll" of interest users to develop a contextual understanding for these users on Twitter, providing a longitudinal analysis. SMCT, for the first time, combined the two data analysis techniques into a single tool.In demonstrative analysis scenarios the SMCT has collected more than 500,000 tweets and identified almost 6,000 as being of interest. The tool has also been used to investigate trends in the responses made by other users to an of interest tweet.

The Orewa Speech: another threat to Maori health?

In early 2004, Dr Don Brash, leader of the National Party (New Zealand's opposition political party), gave a speech to a community group regarding what he perceived to be the preferential treatment of Maori in health and education policies. This viewpoint article is written by a group of concerned medical students at Otago University. It argues that epidemiological data provide strong support for specifically addressing Maori health need, whilst the Treaty of Waitangi represents a contractual obligation on behalf of the New Zealand Government to ensure equity of outcome for Maori. Underpinning both the epidemiological and legal arguments, are ethical principles. The central tenets of medicine (ie, to reduce suffering, and to improve and prolong the quality and length of life) should provide a strong driving force to address these inequalities.