Can my mechanic fix blue cars? A discussion of health clinician\u27s interactions with Aboriginal Australian clients

We expect our professional mechanics to ‘diagnose’ and \u27treat\u27 our cars irrespective of colour, but are we expecting less from our health professionals? There is an increasing focus in the literature on health practitioner decision-making and its influence on the nature and quality of health care. In this article we explore how the basic diagnostic and therapeutic skills that health care practitioners have should be utilised equitably for all clients and propose ways this might be realised. Could the development of Indigenous specific curricula be teaching our medical students to think that Aboriginal patients are different from the norm? We conclude that despite the gains in introducing more comprehensive Aboriginal health curricula there remains considerable work to be done before we can be confident that we are ensuring that health practitioners are no longer contributing to health disparities

Improving supplementary feeding in species conservation

Supplementary feeding is often a knee-jerk reaction to population declines, and its application is not critically evaluated, leading to polarized views among managers on its usefulness. Here, we advocate a more strategic approach to supplementary feeding so that the choice to use it is clearly justified over, or in combination with, other management actions and the predicted consequences are then critically assessed following implementation. We propose combining methods from a set of specialist disciplines that will allow critical evaluation of the need, benefit, and risks of food supplementation. Through the use of nutritional ecology, population ecology, and structured decision making, conservation managers can make better choices about what and how to feed by estimating consequences on population recovery across a range of possible actions. This structured approach also informs targeted monitoring and more clearly allows supplementary feeding to be integrated in recovery plans and reduces the risk of inefficient decisions. In New Zealand, managers of the endangered Hihi (Notiomystis cincta) often rely on supplementary feeding to support reintroduced populations. On Kapiti island the reintroduced Hihi population has responded well to food supplementation, but the logistics of providing an increasing demand recently outstretched management capacity. To decide whether and how the feeding regime should be revised, managers used a structured decision making approach informed by population responses to alternative feeding regimes. The decision was made to reduce the spatial distribution of feeders and invest saved time in increasing volume of food delivered into a smaller core area. The approach used allowed a transparent and defendable management decision in regard to supplementary feeding, reflecting the multiple objectives of managers and their priorities

Socio-technological disasters and engineering expertise in Victorian Britain: The Holmfirth and Sheffield floods of 1852 and 1864

Urban and environmental historians are becoming increasingly interested in the social construction of expertise in the management and control of natural resources. Experts are often depicted as disinterested, neutral and objective professionals, sufficiently qualified to gauge an independent perspective on a given problem. Yet what happens when an expert's judgment is called into question by other professional experts? The micro-analysis of socio-technological disasters offers one way to interrogate the construction and challenge of professional expertise at both the empirical and conceptual levels. Taking a comparative approach towards the study of two major reservoir failures involving considerable death and destruction in the United Kingdom - Holmfirth in 1852 and Sheffield in 1864 - this paper draws on the under-utilised research of the sociologist Barry Turner and others on the social aetiology of disasters as a route into revealing and accounting for the contested nature of expertise within the Victorian engineering professions. It is based on extensive archival research, including the written records of local and central government, private waterworks' proprietors, the printed press and the records of public inquiry. The cases reveal remarkable continuities in administrative and professional knowledge regarding the explanation of socio-technological disasters, as well as the widespread use of outside experts to interrogate the supposed failings of interested parties