Future doctors still care
Health innovation researchers will combine an interactive public lecture with a dramatic exploration of some of the latest thinking on the future of health care.
Above: Professor Moyes Jiwa, Chair of Health Innovation – Chronic Disease, at the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute (image: Curtin University).
By Stephen Easton
A group of Curtin University researchers will bring the drama to academia this week when they creatively explore the changing nature of doctor-patient relationships, as technology improves and the population ages, in a combination of symposium, interactive forum and performance.
The free, public event this Thursday, Re-Inventing the Doctor: What will medicine look like in 20 years’ time? will compare the experience of ‘going to the doctor’ in the 1980s with the present, and what it might be like in the 2020s, in view of the many technological advances expected to be available in coming decades.
Four professional actors will portray the different time periods, through the doctor’s consultations necessary in the treatment of three forms of cancer, all of which currently feature very high mortality rates.
Professor Moyez Jiwa, Chair of Health Innovation – Chronic Disease, at the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, will chair the proceedings, which he said would showcase four new healthcare innovations developed recently at Curtin, but also focus on the role played by the human touch in the healing process.
“We need to be careful talking about technology,” Professor Jiwa said. “My view as a GP of 20 years’ experience is that unless we become robots ourselves, we are going to need that human touch.
“Think about all your experiences of going to see the doctor … you’re already beginning to feel better because somebody is taking an interest in you – you have been heard, and your distress has been listened to.”
Professor Jiwa said the experience of going to the doctor would need to retain its human-to-human aspects for the most effective healthcare, as the doctor’s concern for the patient helped to kick-start the healing process.
While new and converging developments in a range of fields like electronics, robotics, nanotechnology and genomics would allow for new methods of delivering healthcare, these would only act as a tool to provide the same kind of person-to-person care that has always underpinned healthcare, and humans have always extended to one another in some form.
This meant that health and aged care providers would be able to use technology to provide care to those who have the most difficulty accessing it at the moment, where they are able to access it, and many of those people will be working hard looking after their even more frail family members.
“If the proportion of people over the age of 65 by 2030 is going to be one in four, the majority of our patients are going to be in an aged care environment,” Professor Jiwa said. “And that is not healthy people caring for individual people with pathologies, but people with pathologies, caring for people with pathologies.”
“Like the older woman who looks after the man with dementia or heart disease, and neglects her own health and wellbeing … From that perspective, there is a lot of room for intervention, to make people more proactive in terms of prevention and take more control of their health care.
“As [health] providers we need to get away from the paradigm of being reactive to people’s health, and think of ways information can be harnessed so those who are likely to benefit – not just those who make appointments – are encouraged to take control of their health.”
Re-Inventing the Doctor: What will medicine look like in 20 years’ time? is being held this Thursday, 7 July, from 6pm to 7pm at the Bankwest Lecture Theatre on Curtin University’s Bentley Campus. RSVP is essential on events@curtin.edu.au or (08) 9266 2563.
