AMA VICDOC Winter 2025 - Magazine - Page 39
I ENJOY WORKING ON THE INTERFACE
BETWEEN CLINICAL MEDICINE AND
PUBLIC HEALTH.
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Infectious disease physicians are thinking
about our patients in a wider context.
You have a patient with infection, where
did they get it and who might they have
given it to? If you give an antibiotic to
a patient, what’s the potential impact of
that antibiotic and any resistance going
to be on other people and the community
more broadly? Epidemiology is the basic
science of public health. When I started
out, my initial interest was in clinical
epidemiology – treatments and clinical
trials and thinking about epidemiology
in the clinical sense. From there, it
isn’t a very big jump to thinking about
epidemiology in a population sense.
And so, I got into influenza vaccine
effectiveness and influenza surveillance,
and that was how I became interested
in public health.
BOTH MY PARENTS ARE IMMIGRANTS
WHO CAME TO AUSTRALIA FROM
CHINA DURING THE 1950S AND 1960S.
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This was the era of the White Australia
policy, so to receive this recognition of
being made a Companion of the Order of
Australia feels like I’m repaying the faith
the country showed my parents when it
allowed them to make this country their
home. Apparently, I’m only the fourth
Chinese-Australian ever to have received
such an honour. Both my parents have
passed away now, but I was able to share
news of the award with my mother before
she died, and she was very pleased.
THERE ARE THREE PARTS OF THE HEALTH
SYSTEM: THE PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM,
PRIMARY CARE AND SPECIALIST CARE.
-
We need to get the balance right between
these three parts – particularly between
prevention, treatment in primary
care, and treatment by specialists and
hospitals. I think the establishment of
the interim Australian CDC [Centre
for Disease Control] is an important
step in improving Australia’s response
to and preparedness for public health
emergencies. Those of us that work in
public health have talked about it for
decades, so it’s a very big step in the
right direction. I hope it will consolidate
a lot of public health effort and better
coordinate what the states are doing.
In our federated system, hospitals and
public health are the responsibility of
state and territory governments. But
while the systems and contexts are
different, ideally, we’d want the policies
and outcomes to be consistent across
the country. And thinking even further
ahead, we’d like to transition to a seamless
system that includes public health,
primary care, and specialist care all as one
system rather than as fragmented silos.
VI CD O C WI NTER 2025
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