INSANE WORKING HOURS FOR PUBLIC HOSPITAL SURGEONS

Surgery by doctors who have had no sleep for days!! There's nothing like the government to look after you! Thankfully

A trainee surgeon has told how she feared she would kill a patient, after being forced to work four days straight without sleep. The surgical registrar, from a major southeast Queensland public hospital, said she routinely had to operate on patients when she was so tired she felt drunk. I haven't killed someone yet, but probably one day it's going to happen because of my lack of sleep," she told The Sunday Mail. "I'm regularly operating on people when I haven't had sleep for two days. I know I'm making mistakes, I am just fortunate they haven't been any huge errors. "I know some of my colleagues have made errors and they're also worried."

The medic said anyone who spoke out risked being kicked off the surgical training program. She said that over the Christmas long weekend, she worked from Friday to Monday without sleeping at all. Junior doctors - residents and interns - are also working excessive shifts on relatively low pay while they try to establish themselves. They say "mandatory" eight-hour breaks between shifts are non-existent.

"It feels a bit like when you were 16 and you had a really big binge-drinking session," said the surgeon. "Of most concern to me is, I think, your hand-eye co-ordination skills go after two days. Performing surgery in those conditions is poor." She said the most dangerous shifts were on weekends, when doctors were commonly "on call". The weekend shift involves staying at the hospital from 7am Friday until Monday afternoon, and sleeping no more than three hours at a time. "We just need our mandatory break. You need someone to cover you," she said.

The surgeon spoke out as Australian Salaried Medical Officers' Federation president Don Kane seeks an urgent meeting with Health Minister Stephen Robertson to try to combat dangerous work hours. "Queensland Health has sat on its hands and done nothing. It is all promises," Dr Kane said. The union has been keeping examples of "horror shifts" to expose the dangerous working hours. In some cases, doctors had reported working three weeks without a day off.

The shifts continue five years after an overworked junior doctor was involved in a young girl's death. Elise Neville, 10, died two days after being sent home by a junior doctor in charge of Caloundra Hospital's emergency ward in 2002. Dr. Doneman was 20 hours into a 24 hour shift. He did not admit the girl to hospital or perform tests that would have shown she had a serious head injury.

Judge Debbie Richards, from the Queensland Health Practitioners Tribunal, said in 2004: "If this tragedy leads to nothing else, it should lead to the abolition of such brutally long shift hours." Dr Kane said little had changed since.

Health Minister Stephen Robertson said he was concerned by the doctor's comments but blamed long hours on a national shortage of doctors and said hospitals had always used on-call shifts. "That's been a feature of doctors' working hours for you would have to close hospitals, particularly in rural Queensland." He said the Government had been on a recruitment drive to increase the number of doctors in the state and decrease working hours. Rural Doctors Association president Christian Rowan said solo doctors in remote areas were routinely rostered to work 22 days on, then six days off. The Australian Medical Association's Alex Markwell said Queensland's public hospitals relied on junior medics working long hours. "If they go home because they're tired, there's not necessarily anyone else to do their work. People can die if there's no doctors around," Dr. Markwell said.

The above report by David Murray appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on January 28, 2007





New school curriculum proposals still far too vague

The latest approach to an Australian national curriculum is too vague to be useful, writes Kevin Donnelly

Arguments in favour of a national curriculum are not restricted to Australia. While the US is also a federal system and responsibility for education rests at the local level, groups such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation argue for a national approach to detailing what students should learn and the expected levels of achievement. In a recent paper published by the Fordham Foundation, "To Dream the impossible Dream", four approaches are put forward to achieve a national curriculum.

The most aggressive approach is for the central government to enforce a national curriculum that replaces state-based models. The second approach is voluntary and states would be invited to opt into a national svstem designed by the federal government. A third approach is to allow states to continue to develop local curriculums, but to ensure that in each of the different syllabus or framework documents there is common content and skills. The final approach is to allow states to develop their own curriculum documents but for the central government to evaluate them against an agreed benchmark.

Given that both major Australian political parties, at the Commonwealth level, have signalled education as an election issue - in particular, concerns about standards, the quality of the curriculum and the possibility of a national curriculum - it is useful to relate the above four models to the Australian scene. In the same way that the Howard Government has mandated student report cards in plain English and with A to E gradings, the Commonwealth Government could try to force states and territories to adopt a national curriculum by threatening to withhold federal funding.

But Australia's Constitution makes such a course of action problematic and unlikely, as education is the preserve of the states, and the danger is that adopting a one-size-fits-all approach will enforce mediocrity if the model adopted is dumbed down and politically correct. Imagine Western Australia's outcomes-based education approach or Tasmania's Essential Learnings writ large across the nation.

During the early to mid-1990s, we attewmpted the second model, represented by the Keating government's national statements and profiles that detailed learning outcomes in various key learning areas and the expected levels of performance. Such was the substandard nature of the Keating national statements and profiles -- based, as they were, on the experimental and new-age OBE approach -- that the July, 1993, Perth meeting of education ministers refused to endorse the national curriculum.

Now, concerning Statements of Learning, the states and territories, in collaboration with the federal Government, are involved in implementing a variation of the third model. Statements of Learning are defined as "the key knowledge, skills, understandings and capacities that all students in Australia should have the opportunity to learn and develop in a domain, irrespective of the state or territory in which they live". Instead of coercing the states and territories or going to the expense of developing a comprehensive curriculum, a lighter approach is being adopted. The Statements of Learning do not cover a school's entire curriculum, restricted as they are to elements of core subjects such as English, mathematics, civics and citizenship, information and communications technologies and science. The statements relate only to years 3, 5, 7 and 9 and, while states and territories are being asked to integrate them into their own curriculum documents, there will still be a good deal of local variation as states and territories have the right to develop their own curriculums.

Given that the Australian education ministers endorsed the various Statements of Learning in August 2006 and states and territories have until January 2008 to implement the new curriculum approach, it is surprising that there has been no public debate about the usefulness and academic rigour of the statements. The first point to make about this third approach to developing a national curriculum is that it is low-risk and it plays safely into the hands of those responsible for the current parlous state of Australian education.

Whereas the practice in places such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and the US is to benchmark local curriculum internationally in order to ensure what is developed is of the highest international quality, the Statements of Learning are based on what exists within Australia. Instead of clearly defining essential knowledge, understanding and skills that all students are expected to learn, the statements are generalised and vague on the whole and in line with Australia's adoption of OBE.

The refusal to stipulate clearly what all students should learn, regardless of where they go to school, is based on the mistaken belief that schools and teachers must be given the freedom to relate what is taught to the special character of a student. As argued by those responsible for the Statements of Learning, the strength of the approach is that it "leaves systems, sectors and schools with flexibility and autonomy to integrate these statements into their own curriculums in a manner which suits the diversity of students' needs and types of schools across the country".

Again and again, research suggests that what teachers need are clear, concise and unambiguous syllabuses, or road maps, of what they are expected to teach. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel. teachers are thus freed to focus on improving classroom practice, mentoring one another and professional development. Neither the Keating government statements and profiles nor the Statements of Learning are syllabuses and, as such, are not of much practical use to teachers. If governments are serious about a national curriculum, year level-specific syllabuses in key subjects should be developed. Such syllabuses should be internationally benchmarked, academically sound, concise and teacher friendly and, if developed at the federal level, offered to schools on a voluntary basis.

Details about the "Statements of Learning" can be found here

The above article appeared in "The Australian" newspaper on January 27, 2007





Rubbery university standards

MORE than a third of overseas students are completing their degrees at Australian universities with English so poor that they should not have been admitted to tertiary study in the first place. The results of a study by the demographer Bob Birrell confirm widespread concerns expressed by academics over the past decade that the Federal Government's focus on drawing fee-paying students from overseas has led to a collapse in university academic standards. They have complained about the way fee-paying students - who now number 239,000, and who contribute 15 per cent of tertiary income - have brought pressure on universities to ensure pass levels, and an epidemic of plagiarism among some groups of foreign students.

The study showed that 34 per cent of graduating students who were offered permanent residence visas last year were unable to achieve a "competent" English standard in their test scores. Among Chinese students, who are driving much of the growth in export education, the figure was as high as 43.2 per cent. More than half of South Korean and Thai students could not meet required English levels.

"It does raise serious questions about Australian university standards," said Professor Birrell, a Monash University academic and author of the report, published in today's People and Place journal. "How do they get in in the first place? The next [question] is, how do they get through university exams with poor English?"

The Department of Immigration will only issue higher education visas to students who reach band six - a "competent" standard - in the International English Language Testing System. But other types of visas only require students to reach band five. Many students arrive on these visas and use them as a back door to universities.

"We've got mountains of anecdotal data from individual lecturers complaining and people expressing concern [about standards], but this is the first time that confirms those concerns are correct," Professor Birrell said. Professor Peter Abelson, a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney, said universities often turned a blind eye to plagiarism and ineptitude among international students because they relied on their income. "[These figures] are a very stunning result, but not entirely surprising to people who are in tertiary education," he said. Students with poor English were able to pass through university because so much of their assessment work was not done under examination conditions, he said.

But universities said the data did not necessarily prove standards were softening. Professor Gerard Sutton, the president of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, said it was possible the foreign students who had failed to reach a score of six on the International English Language Testing System had scored poorly in the speaking component of the test, which may not have been a critical skill in the course they were taking. "I don't accept that there's a problem in universities in terms of soft marking of international students," Professor Sutton said. [How much evidence does he need?]

Professor Birrell said the results were an indictment on the professional associations that accredited students and allowed them to proceed with residency visas. The report said the Australian Nursing Council would not accredit graduates unless they scored seven in the language test. Dennis Furini, the chief executive of the Australian Computer Society, said his members had not complained about English standards. "In IT, it's more important to know the programming language than the English language."

Source





KOALA RESCUE



A HERCULEAN effort is on to save Victoria's koalas, among the creatures hardest hit by wildfires. Dozens of people, companies and organisations have pitched in to help thousands of koalas devastated by fire around Warrnambool, known as the state's koala capital. Locals liken the community spirit to that seen after Ash Wednesday. Children are gathering gumleaves to feed injured koalas and motel owners have provided towels and blankets to wrap them in.

Melbourne stuntwoman Sue Anderson is climbing trees to rescue injured koalas and arborists are using their cherry-pickers to pluck others from burnt trees to safety. An anonymous woman has signed a blank cheque for Koolix Kafe to cater to volunteers rescuing koalas and the cafe owners are providing cheap meals. Harvey Norman staff have donated a $300 evaporative cooler to keep burnt koalas cool and Bunnings has handed over timber to make temporary enclosures. Speedee Laundry Services owner Alan Walder has turned his washing machines over to clean dirty and bloodied blankets and towels.

A makeshift koala hospital has been set up in the nearby Purnim public hall, where children sit patiently feeding parched koalas drip by drip. Kindergarten assistant Cheryl McKinnon opens the hall each day and places gum leaves collected by children in fresh buckets of water. Her hat stand from home is at the triage treatment centre to hold the drip tubes to supply medicines and fluids. When not in the hall, she is home washing dozens of towels and blankets used to wrap koalas...

Koalas not killed by fire are being found by the dozen, too injured to climb down from their burnt trees. Lucky survivors who have escaped injury face cruel starvation because of the devastation to their habitat. Dr Ong has spent every weekend with her vet husband Chris Barton co-ordinating dozens of local vets and vet nurses as they treat injured koalas brought in.....

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