Leonie Short is a Dental Practitioner and Dental Therapist. She started working as a dental therapist in Rural NSW and then moved into being an academic and researcher. Through her career, Leonie has worked at 6 universities across New South Wales and Queensland, and remaining community focused.
Prior to starting her business, Leonie, was a consumer advocate in the fields of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, substance abuse before concentrating on oral health. Her passion led her to start her business.
Seniors Dental Care Australia focuses on oral health care training and education for workers in the aged home care and disability sectors. These are the whole range of health workers from carers, enrolled nurses, registered nurses, allied health practitioners and general practitioners recognising the need to improve oral health care. Leonie talks about the passion and attention to delivering oral health care teachings.
As a hands on practitioner, Leonie typically delivers training in person and through a shift pattern at seniors or disability support facilities, and also via online. She feels in person and on site delivery is more engaging and raises confidence levels in carers.
Over the past 8 years Leonie has encountered smelly mouths, rotted teeth, infected gums and dirty dentures. Her aims are for people to have nice healthy clean mouths, to be able to smile, to talk, to taste and to eat.
Without a clean mouth, cases of aspiration pneumonia and infected endocarditis increase leading to hospitalisation and death. Leonie talks about a case in the UK of ill-fitting dentures being untreated, compounded by COVID precautions to oral examination leading to the patient choking on her dentures and dying.
Leonie’s mission is to have improved oral health experiences and outcomes, however she recognises, the health system really needs to work hard to make it happen and for people to understand why it needs to be a priority.
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Diary of a Paramedic in a primary health care clinic
Alecka Miles is a lecturer at Edith Cowan University and works as a paramedic in a multidisciplinary team at Dianella Family Medical Centre in Metropolitan Perth, Western Australia.
Community paramedic roles have a history in Australia, dating back to 2007 in New South Wales and followed by similar initiatives in South Australia and New Zealand. Alecka’s position emerged after she sought to evaluate how paramedics could integrate into general practice, ultimately leading to a job offer post-COVID lockdown in 2020. Her skills, particularly in cannulation, proved valuable as healthcare shifted towards primary care.
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Addressing Wound Management
The cost of chronic wounds in Australia is estimated to be $3 Billion per year, impacting 420,000 Australians. Not only is this a national economic concern, but more importantly, is the suffering the person may be going through.
Australian Health Journal met with Hayley Ryan, Board Director and Chair at Wounds Australia and Director at WoundRescue to hear her work in chronic wound management, palliative wounds and pressure injury prevention to comfort those living with a wound.
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Paediatric mental help for children of defence personnel, veterans and first responders
Dr Marg Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, New South Wales. She is a prominent figure in early childhood education New South Wales, and is also a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Manna Institute, a mental health research organisation within the regional university network across Australia, that is building place based research capacity to improve the mental health of regional, rural and remote Australia.
