Australian Journal of General Practice
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The adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ resonates strongly with medicolegal issues. Failing to recognise or manage problems early is likely to lead to worse outcomes and increased costs.
Professional
This article examines medicolegal pitfalls when assessing the decision-making capacity of cognitively impaired patients.
Clinical
GPs can provide factual information about the risks and benefits of treatment in order to assist this process, but are advised to avoid taking sides.
This article examines what microaggressions are and outlines the key roles of protagonist, target, bystander and ally.
Treating GPs have an obligation to report impaired medical student patients if the GP forms a reasonable belief that the medical student patient has put the public at substantial risk of harm.
This article explores GP referrals to other health professionals and aims to describe a doctor’s medicolegal obligations and responsibilities when making a referral.
This article explores the benefits of having a system to accept and deal with patient feedback within a practice and identifies barriers preventing patients from raising their concerns directly.
Clinical challenge
These questions are based on the Focus articles in this issue. Please choose the single best answer for each question.
Editorial
Education and learning activities that specifically target areas of medicolegal risk can help reduce the likelihood and severity of future medicolegal events.
Letters
Readers express their opinions on published articles and topics of interest.
This article discusses the assessment of acute- to subacute-onset erythematous and scaly plaques that are present on multiple body sites in a patient aged >65 years.
Steroid acne may appear in areas of topical steroid application or on patients taking systemic steroids. Treatment should include discontinuation of steroid medication until lesions have resolved.
Research
The moderate accuracy of ChatGPT demonstrates potential risks for both patients and physicians using this tool. Further research is required to create more accurate models.
This study aims to describe the models of care (MoC) used in the provision of IUDs by Australian GPs.
This study examined the effectiveness of a general practice nurse intervention to reduce blood pressure in adults with hypertension who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease.
The paper provides key strategies guiding practices to optimise implementing social work student placements.
Viewpoint
This viewpoint discusses immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) drugs for the treatment of rare and less common cancers.
AJGP would like to thank all our 2023 reviewers for their generous contribution to the journal.