Introducing our speakers
speech abstract
Medicines and Health: Strengthening the Connection
The therapeutic revolution of the last eight decades has provided an expanded armoury of medicines that can be directed most effectively at specific disease states and medical conditions.
Increasingly effective modern day medicines can ameliorate and prevent a wider range of disease states – for example by controlling hypertension, reducing cardiovascular disease, preventing and relieving asthma and modifying the behavioural manifestations of severe mental illness. Early therapeutic enthusiasm for such significant advances is now tempered by increased awareness of accompanying adverse effects, especially for those living with chronic illness. This explains the current emphasis on balancing benefits and harm in the regulation and use of current day medicines. Moreover, changes in life expectancy, in part achieved through the use of more effective medicines, have fuelled major intergenerational effects.
As quality of life is maintained with increasing age, so also are the opportunities for people to remain in the workforce to varying degrees and also to expand upon the leisure component of their life style. Sixty is now forty and eighty is now sixty. Intergenerational change can be expected to have profound social effects on public health expenditure in general and on pharmaceuticals in particular. In the light of the dramatic social and economic changes in medicine use that are before us, we must make different choices, take different approaches and devise different systems.
biography
Andrea Mant is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales and holds an honorary medical appointment in the Therapeutics Centre, St. Vincentís Hospital Sydney. A general practitioner with more than 30 years clinical and research experience, Andrea is Chairman of the Board of Therapeutic Guidelines Limited and a medical member of the Social Security Appeals Tribunal.
In 1992, Andrea was awarded a doctorate in medicine in recognition of her published research work in the field of psychotropic drug prescribing in general practice. Her professional experience has included serving a six year term as a member of the Commonwealth Pharmaceutical Advisory Committee, a statutory committee which advises the Australian Government on the listing of drugs on the national Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; and a five year term as chairman of the Prescribing Intervention Working Group of the National Prescribing Service.
In the course of her career, Andrea has trained most of the National Prescribing Service Facilitators through her best practice course in educational visiting. Up until 2006, Andrea held the senior staff specialist position of Adviser in Quality Use of Medicines in the South Eastern and Illawarra Regional Health Service.
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