The incidence of epilepsy is highest in infancy. Many infant epilepsies, such as infantile spasms, are very severe, with treatment-resistant seizures and major developmental impairments.
This Grand Round will cover advances in understanding of the causes of infant epilepsies, and how these advances have informed changes in investigation of aetiology and guided use of existing and novel treatments, to improve outcomes in these devastating conditions.
Ten months into her term as Commissioner of Children and Young People, Liana Buchanan will reflect on the issues affecting children and young people, and discuss some of the Commission’s current projects and priorities.
This Grand Round explores the role of health professionals in family violence identification and response.
Professor Kelsey Hegarty will discuss how the consequences of family violence are commonly seen in health care settings, and the high intersection of domestic violence and child abuse means that paediatric and women’s health settings have a major role to play in early intervention. Ms Linda Gyorki will talk about how legal problems can have a detrimental impact on health and wellbeing.
Dental decay is one of the most preventable and consequential conditions of childhood. The health of children’s teeth is an important public health and clinical issue for dental and non-dental health practitioners alike, and has far reaching effects throughout life.
Current medical practice is appropriately centred around notions of patient-centred care and personalised medicine. These laudable practices are occurring against a background increasing patient empowerment and disruptive patterns of knowledge transfer. Health care consumers are now interconnected and highly aware of biotechnological advances. Both health care providers and consumers want the latest and “best” in therapies, however all too frequently these therapies are both expensive and non-transformative.
It was during his fellowship at RCH PICU in the mid-90s, that Bernhard Frey first encountered patient safety initiatives such as critical incident reporting and evidence based medicine. Back home, he tried to implement these concepts in Switzerland and complemented them in the following years by issues such as allocation of care, organizing PICU, technical measures, avoiding overtreatment and the importance of the prevailing culture. In this Grand Round, Bernhard Frey will discuss a practical approach for safe medicine, based on his experience and the current literature.
Blunt head trauma is a common presentation in the pediatric ED. Although some children have overt signs of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), many have minor head trauma with no or subtle signs of TBI. Among children with apparently minor blunt head trauma, identifying those who indeed have TBI is challenging. Over the past decade there has been increasing use of computed tomography (CT) to avoid missing children with TBI.
The RCH diabetes camps program is 70 years old this year and one of the oldest such programs in the world. Diabetes camp experiences are profound and are seen internationally as an integral part of paediatric diabetes clinical care. This program speaks to and of what is the soul of the RCH: a holistic patient and family centred approach that goes beyond clinical therapy within the walls of the hospital.
This Grand Round will present the evolution of Paediatrics in Geelong and the Barwon Region, as well as discussing the evolution of General Paediatrics as a specialty. We will discuss the importance of the relationship between The Royal Children’s Hospital and Barwon Health and its role in helping to deliver high quality medical and health care to children of our region. We will also discuss ways in which the relationship will continue to be important as Paediatrics in Geelong develops further in the years ahead. This relationship is a good case study of the role that RCH can take throughout Victoria.
Biologics are therapeutics that target specific components of the immune system. They are characterised by unpronounceable generic names (alemtuzumab, eculizumab, blinotumomab, pembrolizumab). These medications have revolutionised the treatment of several immune-mediated disorders: including rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases, psoriasis, lymphoma, lung, breast, ovarian and other cancers, and macular degeneration, and are widely used in a range of clinical disciplines.
