The Government of South Australia, also referred to as the South Australian Government, SA Government or more formally, Her Majesty’s Government, is the Australian state democratic administrative authority of South Australia. It is modelled on the Westminster system of government, which is governed by an elected parliament..
Objective: The current Guidelines aim to provide evidence-based management recommendations for treatment of people living with schizophrenia in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Methods: The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (ANZJP) commissioned a panel of experts to establish these Guidelines. The existing literature was reviewed to address key health questions. The certainty of evidence was evaluated using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) approach, and the strength of the recommendation was determined by the panel. Results: The ANZJP GRADE Guidelines examined the current evidence base for a range of areas relevant to treatment for people with schizophrenia including: initial physical health assessment; pharmacological treatment; psychological and psychosocial interventions; family, whānau and carers; psychiatric comorbidities; physical health and lifestyle interventions; and special populations. Conclusions: It is hoped that the current Guidelines provide useful recommendations in important aspects of care for people living with schizophrenia and their family, whānau and carers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, both at the individual and systemic levels.
Biological invasions by non-native species pose significant threats to agriculture, ecosystems, human health, and economies. Despite the efforts of management agencies, many populations of invasive species continue to persist and spread, necessitating a deeper understanding of the processes influencing their growth and expansion. We investigated the potential for unwanted genetic rescue to increase the population growth rate and spread of invasive European fallow deer (Dama dama) in south-eastern Australia. Using a single nucleotide polymorphism dataset from over 340 individuals, we assessed genetic diversity, levels of inbreeding, and population structure and connectivity. We found low genetic diversity and heightened inbreeding across most fallow deer surveyed, highlighting potential for inbreeding depression. However, a small number of populations had significantly higher diversity and lower inbreeding. We hypothesize that the high diversity populations stem from farmers importing diverse fallow deer lineages for artificial breeding, with some of those animals (or their progeny) subsequently escaping or being released into the wild. We explored the potential for recently imported genetic variants to spread across populations by examining population connectivity. Finally, to demonstrate the risk of unwanted genetic rescue in fallow deer, we simulated population growth under different scenarios and show that reduced inbreeding is expected to substantially increase population growth rates. Our study highlights the importance of integrating genetic considerations into invasive species control. To enhance deer management in Australia we recommend considering migration patterns in control program design, containing high-diversity populations, and strengthening the containment and biosecurity requirements of farmed and imported deer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries used real-time data analyses, predictive modelling, and COVID-19 case forecasts, to incorporate emerging evidence into their decisions. In Australia, national and jurisdictional public health responses were informed by weekly ensemble forecasts of daily COVID-19 case counts for each of Australia's eight states and territories, produced by a consortium of researchers under contract with the Australian Government. As members of this consortium, who produced these forecasts at each week, we now retrospectively evaluate approximately 100,000 predictions for daily case counts 1-28 days into the future, generated between July 2020 and December 2022, and report here (a) how the ensemble forecasts supported public health responses; (b) how well the ensemble forecast performed, relative to the forecasts produced by each contributing team; and (c) how we refined our reporting and visualisations to ensure that outputs were interpreted appropriately. Similar to COVID-19 forecasting studies in other countries, we found that the ensemble forecast consistently out-performed the individual model forecasts, and that performance was lowest when there were rapid changes in the epidemiology, such as periods around epidemic peaks. Our consortium's internal peer-review process allowed us to explain how features of each ensemble forecast related to the design of the individual models, and this helped enable public health stakeholders to interpret the forecasts appropriately. Ultimately, our forecasts provided information that supported public health responses during periods of different policy goals, and over a wide range of epidemic scenarios.
