Mt Claremont GP Dr Rosemary Quinlivan, above, has been preparing for her third solo crossing in the annual Rottnest Channel Swim, which splashes down at Cottesloe Beach on February 25. Her cheer squad is a band of doctors, two of whom were in her year group at the UWA medical school. Mandurah GP Dr Tony Tropiano is skipper of her support boat alongside his son, Mike, and Rosemary’s daughter, dermatology registrar Dr Louise O’Halloran, herself a veteran of the swim, will be paddling. On dry land but very much involved is Dr Pam Hendry who approached her friend Rosemary to swim on behalf of the Ladybird Foundation, of which Pam is a founder. Funds raised by Rosemary’s swim will go to the ROLLIS (Radio-guided Occult Lesion Localisation using Iodine 125 Seeds) breast cancer clinical trial after the trial’s co-lead, Prof Christobel Saunders, asked the foundation for urgent funds to hire a Clinical Trial Coordinator to see the project to its completion. Pam said that donations can be made on Rosemary’s supporter page https://rottnestswim2017.everydayhero.com/au/rosemary-o-halloran-solo-rottnest-chanel-swim-for-ladybird-f
Picture by Jay Campi
Peel stays with Ramsay
The WA Government has extended Ramsay’s operating contract for the Peel Health campus for a further five years. The announcement was made a year before the current contract had expired. Minister John Day said the extension secured the service and allowed time for forward planning. The new competitive pricing contract brings Peel in line with other Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), namely with St John of God Midland Public Hospital, which signed an initial 20-year contract with the government. Since the announcement, the government has committed an extra $1.9m to clear the backlog of public elective surgeries at Peel. Going by media reports, it will need all that in the ENT area alone.
Hippy, hippy shake
When it comes to judging patient outcomes, you could do worse than line up a team with hip replacements and pit them against a team with knee replacements on a hockey pitch. Just before Christmas, the Australian Orthopaedic Association did just that at an event at the Perth Hockey Stadium to mark the AOA’s 80th anniversary. It was the brainchild of Simon Thomson, the president of Western Hockey Masters, when he realised the growing number of players wanting to play after their various joint replacement surgeries. So 27 players over the age of 50 (average age of 69) with at least one knee or hip replaced took to the field in a battle of the prosthetics. For the record, the Hip team won 3-1 and local AOA representative Dr Greg Witherow presented it with the Hip-Knee trophy.
IT business moves
Medical Forum attended the HITWA innovations conference in Perth late last year and was intrigued by the connections of one of its sponsors, Core Medical Solutions. CMS is a software company started by two doctors in South Australia in the public hospital system. Their flagship product BOSSnet is the “clinical information system of choice”. The business, which was “actively seeking to partner/ joint venture with similarly minded organisations”, was doing something right in November because soon after the HITWA meeting it was acquired by US electronic medical record (EMR) giant Allscripts (which had just undergone a decline in share price). Pulse+IT reported that in WA, BOSSnet is in FSH, will be in the new Perth Children’s Hospital, and …has gone live at Bunbury and Busselton hospitals, part of a 14-strong roll-out for WACHS. Separately, an independent report in 2015 pointed to problems with BOSSnet’s EMR at FSH. Now, a patient portal is top of their agenda. Allscripts is rolling out the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) for the SA Department for Health. Both Sunrise PAS and dbMotion™ (a population health solution) are Allscript products that CMS’s co-founder said would be introduced into Australia.