February 2025

Northern Health officially welcomed 150 new junior doctors to its workforce on Monday with a comprehensive, hybrid orientation designed to ease the new doctors into their roles. The half-day event kicked off with a warm welcome from Prahlad Ho, Northern Health’s Chief Medical Officer and Dr Susanty Tay, Northern Health’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer. They both emphasised the hospital’s values of ‘safe, kind, together’, offering guidance on the junior doctors’ responsibilities and expectations across Northern Health. They introduced the new Director of Northern Doctors Education, Dr Kim Jeffs, on what was her first day in the role. Dr Chiu Kang,…

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Today is World Cancer Day. The theme this year is ‘United by Unique,’ which emphasises the importance of placing people and their stories at the heart of care. As stated on the World Cancer Day website, “Behind every diagnosis lies a unique human story.” Today, we would like to share the story of Montse (short for Montserrat), a 78-year-old proud Catalan originally from Barcelona, who arrived in Australia 52 years ago. As Montse explains, “I moved to Melbourne after marrying an Australian whom I met while on holiday in Italy. We had a daughter together and settled in the suburb…

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Northern Health’s Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) Program ‘Guidance’ is undergoing a major upgrade in 2025. This program has been used at Northern Health since 2011 and is an essential decision support tool used to promote safe and appropriate antimicrobial use across the organisation. Guidance is a web-based antimicrobial decision support program designed by the National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship (NCAS) to support AMS activities in hospitals. First developed in 2005, the program has been implemented in over 60 hospitals nationally and has been associated with reductions in broad-spectrum antimicrobial use, gram negative resistance rates and antimicrobial costs. The upgraded program will…

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