Long term outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians after hospital intensive care

Critically ill Indigenous Australians and mortality: a complex story

“…In this issue of the MJA, Mitchell and his colleagues 9 provide an important sequel to this story. They have achieved one of the holy grails of critical care studies by using data linkage techniques to estimate long term mortality (up to 8 years after ) for critically ill Indigenous patients; in this case, for patients with South Australian residential postcodes.…”

“…The median age of Indigenous patients in intensive care is lower, as is their risk of in-hospital death (probably because they are younger), but long term mortality is substantially higher; the estimated number of years of life lost was nearly double that of non-Indigenous critically ill patients. 9 This tragedy is compounded by the fact that the diagnostic groups in which critically ill Indigenous patients are most over-represented -sepsis and trauma -can be alleviated by public health interventions. 7,8 Relative survival in the study by Mitchell and colleagues 9 was related more to that of the background population than the episode of critical illness.…”

A New Year, the top research articles, and a call to deliver a “net zero” Australian health care system by 2040

“…It is therefore a privilege to announce the top articles published by the MJA in 2020 as chosen by the editors. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] The MJA published leading research and perspectives on severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), including the first SARS-CoV-2 isolated in Australia, uploaded to GenBank for immediate sharing with the global scientific community. 13 On 19 January 2020, a man from Wuhan was admitted in a hospital due to progressive respiratory symptoms 5 days after arrival in Melbourne.…”

“…It is therefore a privilege to announce the top articles published by the MJA in 2020 as chosen by the editors 13‐23 . The MJA published leading research and perspectives on severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), including the first SARS‐CoV‐2 isolated in Australia, uploaded to GenBank for immediate sharing with the global scientific community 13 .…”

“…In another study linking data from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Adult Patient Database to four population‐level datasets, Mitchell and colleagues 18 evaluated the in‐hospital, 12‐month and 8‐year mortality after non‐elective admission to four South Australian intensive care units (ICUs), by Indigenous status. They showed that while Indigenous Australians admitted to the ICU were mostly younger with more chronic disease burden, the in‐hospital mortality, adjusted for major demographic and clinical factors, was similar to non‐Indigenous Australians.…”