This is our last newsletter of 2024 – a year that has been packed with health services news and no shortage of drama. We’ve loved every minute of it.
Welcome to the last Health Services Daily of 2024! You certainly can’t say it’s been dull.
At the end of our first full calendar year of publication, we’ve recorded almost half a million pageviews on our articles, and 270,300 visits on our website.
From inquiries, estimates, hearings, press conferences, annual reports, guidelines, tenders and grants, press releases, and the never-ending maze of government websites, we have winkled out news covering private hospitals, public hospitals, governments, primary health networks, software vendors, agencies, digital health, AI, technology, telehealth, the ASX, private health insurance and workforce shifts, and industrial action.
One of the beauties (and nightmares!) of digital journalism is we get to see what is grabbing your interest in real time. It’s the nature of the beast that the longer a story is online the more clicks it gets, so it’s no big surprise that stories published in January can, superficially at least, seem more important than ones published two days ago.
Nevertheless, there were some notable spikes throughout the year when we’ve really hit a nerve.
Our top story early in the year was an interview with former Coviu CEO Silvia Pfeiffer after her departure from the telehealth platform. Ms Pfeiffer said that when your company grows 6000%, you learn a lot of lessons in a short space of time.
“If I was to do it all over again, I would place myself in the US as the CEO and founder of the business. Live there for a bit to actually understand the market,” she said
“The alternative is to hire a clinician from the local market – somebody who understands the market very well and has a knack for sales. Then partner them with the product manager and have the two of them together do a lot of potential customer interviews.
“Then they can generate good ideas for how to find that product’s market fit. Figure out what feature gaps need to be filled in order to address a new market.”
Scope of practice has been a big topic all year. Pharmacists want to prescribe, they want to treat, they want to be called Doctor.
Nurses want to do more, and midwives want to do what they do without collaborative arrangements.
Physiotherapists want to refer directly to orthopaedic surgeons without reference to the patient’s GP.
And GPs just want to be valued.
Associate Professor Alison Weatherstone, chief midwife of the Australian College of Midwives, hit a nerve when she said the Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce review held enormous potential for the profession of midwifery.
“This review is a great first step, we just need to be brave enough to take the next one; implementation,” she said.
We all know now that the midwives, pharmacists, nurses and physios have largely got their wishes granted, although there’s many a slip twixt report and implementation.
The GPs? Not so much.
Our publisher Jeremy Knibbs has a happy knack for poking the bear and in March he kicked off with an exclusive – as a part of a new healthcare system data paradigm the DoHAC was working on, within a few years most GP management systems would be upgraded for sharing data more seamlessly on the cloud via technologies like FHIR and open APIs.
Nine months on this doesn’t sound very newsy but it was the start of a big year in digital health.
JK went on to pen seven more blockbuster articles, all of them popular with the readers, all of them digging deep into why government agencies do what they do, and how those things could be done better:
- Telstra Health not for sale, bets on massive overhaul
- PHN review a waste of $2m: they’re not the problem
- AI scribe wars heating up
- ADHA releases draft HIE architecture and roadmap
- Why does Sonic want to control both Cubiko and Best Practice?
- ADHA to hire $550k consultant to fire its consultants
- Unravelling the logic of a $30m virtual aged care tender
Readers love a list it seems, and our March article — Australia’s best hospitals, and how they rank globally was the year’s biggest performer, topping our rankings for weeks after it was first published.
Another listicle which grabbed your attention wasWho are the best-paid Commonwealth public servants?, closely followed by a perennial favourite, How much does the DoHAC secretary earn?
Personnel movements have also proved popular with you, with a quiet move by eHealth NSW late in the year proving our most popular Pillar to Post of the year.
Here are our top 10 most-clicked articles for 2024, officially:
- Australia’s best hospitals, and how they rank globally
- Continuing unrest in nursing sector as industrial action bubbles along
- Healthcare sector remains the ‘wild west’ of cybersecurity
- Victorian public hospitals and services $1bn in the red
- Veteran aged care advocate named to transition taskforce
- Dodgy NDIS providers on notice as $15m fines proposed
- Is hospital-to-GP our most important HIE use case?
- Twin cities’ health service deficit explodes 15-fold as dramas continue
- Healthscope devalues its business by almost $1 billion
- Lessons not learned as health expenditure drops to pre-pandemic levels
Thanks
We love bringing you HSD. Our mission is to help nudge the healthcare system towards better outcomes.
That’s something we take very seriously, but we have fun doing it and we hope that fun shows through in our work, at least some of the time.
My thanks to our team of journalists — Holly Payne, Laura Woodrow, Harriet Grayson and Amanda Sheppeard – who are dogged on the trail of juicy story.
My thanks too to JK who gives us our head (most of the time) and leads by example when it comes to being brave and bear-poky.
But most of all, thanks to you, our readers, for engaging, reading, arguing, agreeing and disagreeing with us all year long. We couldn’t do it without you.
We won’t be neglecting you entirely! There will be three summer reading newsletters over the coming weeks and the first daily newsletter of the year will hit your inboxes on Monday 13 January.
Until then, have a relaxing and joyful break when it comes to you. And we will see you in 2025!
As always if you have a comment or something you want us to know about email me at cate@healthservicesdaily.com.au
Cate Swannell – editor Health Services Daily and The Medical Republic