Australia Website Research Articles

The Employers’ View of “Work-Ready” Graduates: A Study of Advertisements for Marketing Jobs in Australia

This study of job advertisements extends our understanding of how employers, rather than researchers, describe the specific skills and attributes sought in candidates for employment in graduate marketing roles in Australia. The article presents the findings of a content analysis of 359 marketing job advertisements downloaded in 2016, in two periods 6 months apart, from the dominant job finding website in Australia, seek.com.au. These data offer detailed primary records authored by employers, and set the research apart from most studies, which rely on generic variables imposed by academics, despite the mooted gap between academia and the business sector. The most demanded attributes included motivation, time management, communication skills, and digital marketing experience. This raises questions about the purpose of a degree, and whether marketing curricula are fit for purpose. The article explores these findings and other preconditions for being “work-ready,” and the study contributes to the underdeveloped employability research from Australia.

PA02.05 Access to Care: Australia

In June 2016, Lung Foundation Australia launched an evidence-based, clear and concise guide, the “Lung Cancer Patient Pathway,” for patients with a confirmed lung cancer diagnosis. The guide is available as a printed resource and online resource supported by a micro-site on Lung Foundation Australia’s website and the Lung Cancer Network Australia website and has been distributed to the majority of dedicated lung cancer treatment centers around Australia. The main aim of producing the Lung Cancer Patient Pathway (LCPP) was to provide newly diagnosed patients with a “one stop” resource that outlines the clinical referral pathways and details the full range of treatment options and supportive care services available to them throughout their lung cancer journey. The LCPP also aims to improve patient health literacy and empower patients with access to evidence based information to support informed decision making and treatment choices, self- management and ultimately, to improve patient outcomes. The LCPP was launched in conjunction with the launch of the Lung Foundation’s Australian Lung Cancer Multi-Disciplinary Team Directory http://lungfoundation.com.au/mdt/. This national directory lists the current (64) dedicated lung cancer multidisciplinary (MDT) services around Australia. It is intended to facilitate referrals of patients to hospitals delivering MDT-based lung cancer management. The creation of this national directory has forged closer relationships between the Lung Foundation and dedicated lung cancer multidisciplinary (MDT) services and provided a mechanism to be able to reach patients at time of diagnosis. Lung Foundation has previously struggled to reach patients early in their cancer journey. Strengthening these relationships with Lung MDT services has led to a systematic distribution of Lung Foundation patient kits including the LCPP info-graph. The Cancer Nurses Society of Australia Winter Congress in May 2016 and Australian Lung Cancer Conference in August 2016 presented opportunities to distribute the printed LCPP in conference delegate bags and at trade exhibitions to more than 550 cancer clinicians and nurses. The Lung Foundation will implement the following strategies to ensure the sustainability of this project: Info-graph will be trialed in Lung Cancer MDTs around Australia, Info-graph will form part of the Lung Cancer Consultative Groups activities, A minimum review period of two years for info-graph and website content, Annual budget allocation for ongoing promotion and dissemination. The Lung Cancer Patient Pathway project has produced a patient centered resource to empower newly diagnosed patients with current, evidence based information so that they can make informed decisions on treatment options and supportive care services and access the right treatment and care at the right time. This project was managed by Glenda Colburn, Director, Lung Cancer National Program, Lung Foundation Australia. The Lung Cancer patient pathway was made possible via unrestricted education grants. Principal sponsor: Bristol-Myers Squibb Supporting Sponsors: AstraZenea, Boehringer Ingelheim, Cancer Australia, Pfizer, Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, MSD.

Medicine shortages in Australia: causes, impact and management strategies in the community setting.

Background Medicine shortages are an ongoing global problem. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) dedicated a website for monitoring of medicine shortages in Australia in May 2014, as part of the Medicine Shortage Information Initiative. This study aimed to explore the views of pharmacists regarding medicine shortages in the community setting and the impact of the TGA website in Australia. Setting Community pharmacies in New South Wales, Australia. Method Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with community pharmacists. Data collected were analysed thematically utilising the framework analysis method. Main outcome measure Qualitative analysis conducted using the framework approach. Results Findings clearly indicated that medicine shortages were experienced on a regular basis, but most participants were unaware of the TGA website. Medicine shortages reportedly impacted both pharmacists and consumers; and various workarounds were undertaken to manage the issue. The "price disclosure policy" was found to be a prominent contributing factor in emerging shortages. Suggestions were made for ways to improve the growing occurrence of shortages. Conclusion Overall, the study found that there was a lack of familiarity with the TGA website, despite experiencing regular shortages of medicines in practice. Also highlighted, was the importance of pharmacists prioritising patient care over business decisions. To reduce prescribing of out-of-stock medicines notifying doctors about shortages was also considered important, to allow for early action to be taken at higher levels of the supply chain. Findings of this study may help direct future policy-making around the world, as medicine shortages is a problem shared by healthcare providers in most countries around the world.

Australia's onshore basin inventory: volume I

Following the publication of Geoscience Australia Record 2014/09: Petroleum geology inventory of Australia’s offshore frontier basins by Totterdell et al (2014), the onshore petroleum section of Geoscience Australia embarked on a similar project for the onshore Australian basins. Volume I of this publication series contains inventories of the McArthur, South Nicholson, Georgina, Amadeus, Warburton, Wiso, Galilee, and Cooper basins. A comprehensive review of the geology, petroleum systems, exploration status, and data coverage for these eight Australian onshore basins was conducted, based on the results of Geoscience Australia’s precompetitive data programs, industry exploration results, and the geoscience literature. A petroleum prospectivity ranking was assigned to each basin, based on evidence for the existence of an active petroleum system. The availability of data and level of knowledge in each area was reflected in a confidence rating for that ranking. This extended abstract summarises the rankings assigned to each of these eight basins, and describes the type of information available for each of these basins in the publically available report by Carr et al (2016), available on the Geoscience Australia website. The record allocated a high prospectivity rating for the Amadeus and Cooper basins, a moderate rating for the Galilee, McArthur and Georgina basins, and a low rating for the South Nicholson, Warburton and Wiso basins. The record lists how best to access data for each basin, provides an assessment of issues and unanswered questions, and recommends future work directions to lessen the risk of these basins in terms of their petroleum prospectivity. Work is in progress to compile inventories on the next series of onshore basins.

Syndromic Surveillance using Twitter Data

The Federal Department of Health website in Australia on 22 October reported that in 2014 influenza A (H1N1) dominated across most jurisdictions throughout the season, however influenza A (H3N2) was predominant in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, with late season increases noted in Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. This paper used daily counts of flu symptom tweets to describe the differences in the outbreaks across the various states and territories in Australia for the 2014 season. However, the tweet data indicates a two wave flu outbreak for Victoria that was not picked up in this report. This paper also illustrates that the flu outbreaks for flu in some states were no different to the 2013 flu season while in others it was significantly greater for a long period. The varying nature of the burden of this disease in Australia is outlined in this paper but the variable nature of the outbreaks across Australia is difficult to explain or understand. Future efforts should be devoted to understanding these differences.

Governmentality and My School: School Principals in Societies of Control

The introduction of new accountabilities and techniques of government for the purposes of educational reform have created new complexities and tensions for school leadership. Policies such as the publishing of league tables in the UK, high stakes testing in the US and the introduction of the My School website in Australia are particularly significant for school principals. In this article I appeal to the work of Foucault and Deleuze to provide an alternate approach to understanding how principals are constituted as subjects through a range of practices and discourses associated with the introduction of the My School website. I specifically draw upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality and Deleuze’s notion of societies of control to provoke new lines of thought into these government practices. I argue that it is through the performative in the education system that school principals are becoming perpetually assessable subjects.

A specialist’s audit of aggregated occurrence records

Occurrence records for named, native Australian millipedes from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) were compared with the same records from the Millipedes of Australia (MoA) website, compiled independently by the author. The comparison revealed some previously unnoticed errors in MoA, and a much larger number of errors and other problems in the aggregated datasets. Errors have been corrected in MoA and in some data providers’ databases, but will remain in GBIF and ALA until data providers have supplied updates to these aggregators. An audit by a specialist volunteer, as reported here, is not a common occurrence. It is suggested that aggregators should do more, or more effective, data checking and should query data providers when possible errors are detected, rather than simply disclaim responsibility for aggregated content.

Picturing Assimilation in Post-war Australia: ‘Destination: Australia. Sharing Our Post-war Migrant Stories’, www.destinationaustralia.gov.au, a National Archives of Australia website and exhibition based on its Immigration Photographic Archive

The National Archives of Australia is preparing a website and an exhibition based on the Immigration Photographic Archive it holds in series A12111.1 The website is a welcome development that will ...

Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance

Bunnies, Bilbies, and the Ethic of Ecological Remembrance

Stories with Impact: The Potential of Storytelling to Contribute to Cultural Research and Social Inclusion

Stories with Impact: The Potential of Storytelling to Contribute to Cultural Research and Social Inclusion

AUSGeoid09: a more direct and more accurate model for converting ellipsoidal heights to AHD heights

In an absolute sense, AUSGeoid09 is an order of magnitude more accurate than AUSGeoid98 at converting ellipsoidal heights to Australian Height Datum (AHD) heights and vice versa. Results of this study show AUSGeoid09 can be used to compute AHD heights from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) ellipsoidal heights with an uncertainty of less than ±0.03 m (one sigma). The improvement is largely due to the inclusion of a geometric component in AUSGeoid09 that accounts for the spatially varying offset between a gravimetric quasigeoid model and the AHD. This geometric component was calculated using least squares collocation in cross validation mode and then added to the gravimetric quasigeoid. Although previous AUSGeoid models were used to convert GNSS ellipsoidal heights to the AHD and vice versa, none until now have accounted for the gravimetric quasigeoid to AHD offsets. This offset is a consequence of how the AHD was realised and has commonly resulted in misfits of ∼0.5 m or more. When used with GNSS technology, AUSGeoid09 can replace the need for traditional third-order levelling (Class LC; 12) in many situations. Relative tests of AUSGeoid09 over a continent-wide set of over 20 million baselines showed that it can deliver better than Class LC tolerances in 99 percent of cases. The model accepts a user's GDA94 latitude, longitude and ellipsoidal height and returns an AHD height and deviations of the vertical. AUSGeoid09 is now available free-of-charge on the Geoscience Australia website (http://www.ga.gov.au/geodesy/ausgeoid/nvalcomp.jsp).

GlobalVoices InAustralia; Transparency, Autonomy, and Performance Pay in Australia

A new web site in Australia has become the focus of a swirling debate about national testing, transparency, and performance pay. The new web site, called My School (www.myschool.edu.au), was unveiled earlier this year and reports the performance of each of Australia's almost 10,000 schools on national tests of student achievement. Tests in the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) were administered for the third time in May 2009 for all students in Grades 3, 5, 7, and 9. School cards contain a description of each school along with the raw scores on tests and comparisons to 60 statistically schools and schools in the same neighborhood. The web site reports student attendance rates and how each school scores on the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA). All schools that receive public funds, including public and private schools, have an online report card. The web site has brought into focus extensive debate in recent months on the merits of national testing and the high level of transparency. The public generally supports the testing program and the high level of transparency. But teachers, principals, and the public oppose transparency in the form of the My School web site if it allows the media to construct so-called league tables that compare school performance. Teachers and Testing Members of the Australian Education Union (AEU), the largest of the teachers unions serving the public sector, unanimously approved a resolution at its annual conference in January that teachers will refuse to administer the 2010 tests scheduled in May unless federal Minister for Education Julia Gillard assures them that such league tables can't be produced. She has provided that assurance in the past, but there have been no changes in how school performance is presented online, and several crude league tables duly appeared in several newspapers after My School went live in January. Gillard, who is also deputy prime minister, has threatened legal strike-breaking action if teachers withdraw their services. The opposition party in the federal parliament, the Liberal-National Coalition, has taken a cautious approach to the My School web site. The Liberal-Nationals strongly endorse the national testing program--not surprising, because this is the party that initiated national testing when it was in government before the election of the Rudd Labor government in late 2007. On the one hand, the opposition downplays the web site, claiming it will prove ineffective or be ignored, going the way of similar initiatives of the government called Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch. Events since the launch of My School suggest this did not occur. There have been an unprecedented number of hits on the web site, and there has been vigorous and balanced debate on the main pages of daily newspapers. After the initial appearance of simplistic tables, newspapers have refrained from publishing full league tables. A private company that has done so may well be sued by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which conducts the tests and operates My School. The Liberal-National opposition argues that high-stakes testing and reporting demands that principals have more authority to select their staff. The level of autonomy across the country is uneven. Private schools, which enroll about 35% of all students (exceeding 50% at the upper secondary level in the largest capital cities), have a very high level of autonomy; public schools in much of the country have relatively little. Julia Gillard has yet to declare her hand regarding what level of autonomy would prove best for schools. …

Pharmaceutical industry funding of educational events for pharmacists in Australia: an analysis of data from the first 6 months of a mandatory disclosure programme

The aim of the study was to assess the extent of pharmacist participation in pharmaceutical industry-sponsored educational events in Australia. A descriptive analysis was performed of 14 649 educational events provided by 43 companies between July and December 2007, using publicly available reports posted on the Medicines Australia website. Pharmacist participation was assessed according to duration and type of event, whether continuing professional education credits were awarded, type of venue, hospitality provided and cost of hospitality. Most of the 14 649 industry-sponsored events reported in this mandatory reporting programme were targeted at doctors (specialists and general practitioners). Pharmacists were present at 621 events (4.2%); 209 events were pharmacist-only events. Of pharmacist-only events, 68% were held in hospitals and professional rooms and 13% in restaurants. In contrast, 32% of events involving doctors were held in restaurants (difference in proportions 18.9%; 95% confidence interval 13.5-22.9%) Sixty-six per cent of pharmacist-only events were 1 h or less in duration; 81% were 2 h or less. Almost 40% were reported as training or in-service activities, generally conducted in hospitals. Only three events had continuing professional education credits assigned. The most common topics discussed were oncology, diabetes, haematology, cardiology and gastroenterology; a specific medicine was mentioned in the descriptor for 23 of the 209 (11%) events. Hospitality provided was generally modest, averaging AU$36.24 per pharmacist across all pharmacist-only events, and lower in hospital (AU$9.21 per head) than those held in restaurants (AU$51.42). The data from this first report suggest pharmacists were not a major target for industry-funded educational events. Exposure to such events will likely increase as pharmacists take on enhanced prescribing roles and it is important that this is captured under the mandatory disclosure requirements that have been introduced in a number of jurisdictions. It is also desirable that such schemes include generic medicines manufacturers and that pharmacy professional bodies use these data to monitor and manage the level and impact of interactions between pharmacists and industry.

Importance of native language in a population‐based health survey among ethnic Chinese in Australia

To assess the impacts of survey languages on participation and representativeness of the study subjects in a health survey in a Chinese community in Australia. A random sample of 500 ethnic Chinese in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia was surveyed during November 2005 to February 2006 by using a bilingual survey questionnaire in their preferred languages, i.e. English or Chinese. 210 questionnaires were returned. Two-thirds of the participants chose to answer the questionnaires in Chinese. Besides being older with relatively lower income, they were more likely to be married, have a Chinese family doctor, and visit a Chinese medicine practitioner. Fewer of them have visited the Diabetes Australia website or read any educational information materials about diabetes. The multilingual approach is crucial to improving participation and representativeness of samples from ethnic populations.

What happened to the prescribing of other COX‐2 inhibitors, paracetamol and non‐steroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs when rofecoxib was withdrawn in Australia?

To analyse how the prescribing of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors, non-selective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (ns-NSAIDs) and paracetamol (acetaminophen) changed when rofecoxib was withdrawn in 2004. COX-2 inhibitors, paracetamol and ns-NSAID's use was measured using dispensing data for concession beneficiaries subsidized by the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS) for the period of 1997-2005. Data were downloaded from the Medicare Australia website and converted, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC)/Defined Daily Dose (DDD) (2005), to DDD/1000 concession beneficiaries/day. In the period 2000-2004, the use of COX-2 inhibitors was progressively increased. Overall NSAID's use changed from approximately 80 to 105 DDD/1000 concession beneficiaries/day while a decrease of ns-NSAIDs from about 70 to 40 DDD/1000 concession beneficiaries/day was observed. Following rofecoxib withdrawal, the overall NSAIDs use declined. In 2005, celecoxib prescription declined (23%) while prescription of meloxicam increased by 62%. Use of paracetamol was steady over the period 1997-2004 (around 40 DDD/1000 concession beneficiaries/day). In April 2005, a slight increase in paracetamol use was observed. Our analysis showed that COX-2 inhibitors prescribing markedly influenced the overall NSAIDs prescribing in Australia. When COX-2 inhibitors were introduced their uptake was rapid and extensive. Following rofecoxib withdrawal, the total overall dispensing of NSAIDs returned to a similar value as before COX-2 inhibitors' introduction. The decrease was due both to rofecoxib withdrawal and to a reduction in celecoxib prescribing. However, meloxicam use increased. Paracetamol prescribing was steady, between 1997 and 2005 and was not affected when the COX-2 inhibitors were introduced on to the market and after rofecoxib withdrawal, rather than increasing as might have been anticipated after rofecoxib withdrawal.

The Impact of the World Wide Web on the Future Marketing Roles of DMOs

It is assumed that the web-based Internet has effective functions to implement both all-possible promotions and a cyber distribution channel simultaneously. However, for DMOs to meet the Internet-usage demand of online travellers these official marketing organizations have to make a considerable investment in terms of initial capital cost for set-up and maintenance of the web functions despite the low financial gains from the on line travel market at present. In order to capitalise on the marketing potential of a latent on line holiday market, DMOs need to determine which web functions are preferred by these travellers so that a cost-effective DMO website can be developed and usage satisfaction is increased. This study examines online visitors to the Canberra Tourism & Event Corporation(CTEC) website in Australia by using a self-selected web survey. As a result, among five web functions: multimedia, flexibility, comparability, bookability, and interactivity, it was discovered that online holiday travellers prefer to use the photo effect of multimedia, the flexibility, and interactivity functions on the web.This paper proposes that a DMO website should adopt three roles in the future: a web information provider role; a web intermediary role and a web media provider role.