One in four Australians aged 15 and older is incontinent. And don’t assume they’re all infirm and elderly; those most at risk are pregnant women, men with prostate disease, women who’ve had babies, overweight people and elite athletes. [ + ]

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Night duty: it’s the easiest shift, right? No one gets up fifty times to go to the bathroom. No one rings the bell. No doctors come through, and patients never get sick and need care. Night shift is a controversial part of nursing. If you’ve never worked it, you have no idea what it’s like. If you have – and most have – you know it is not as easy as everyone makes it sound. In fact, it is probably the most difficult shift because you are constantly fighting the need for sleep and still making clinical decisions. [ + ]

This is the first in the How Australians Die series that focuses on the country’s top five causes of death and how we can drive down rates of these illnesses.  [ + ]

“I’ve been on a mission for seventeen years. It’s my holy grail. I’m trying to cure a brain tumor called DIPG that kills 100 percent of the children who have it. It only affects 200 kids a year so it’s never gotten much attention. But if you saw a child die from DIPG, you’d understand why I care so much. It’s awful. It’s just awful. [ + ]

A new smartphone app—designed to support Australian health professionals during emergencies—has been officially launched by Australian Prescriber and NPS MedicineWise. [ + ]

Traditional rivals Monash and Melbourne Universities are collaborating to create a new company that will market and sell medicines developed by the institutions to pharmaceutical companies, reinvesting any profit into research. [ + ]

Those crackling sounds of knees in the morning may sound scary, but there’s constant noise coming out of moving joints that we just don’t hear. Normal sounds may indicate healthy knees while unusual ones may point to something not quite right. Researchers at Georgia Tech are now investigating a sort of stethoscope for the knees, consisting of microphones and a film-based vibration sensor, stuck to the leg that listen for and interpret the sounds coming from within. [ + ]

Experts are calling for a national register of cost-effective medicines for public hospitals as medical advances push up the cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). [ + ]

Every code blue deserves a figurative autopsy to bolster prevention of the next. We are pretty good at the prevention of deep vein thrombosis [DVT], pulmonary embolism [PE], and line infections. We do some things well like faithfully reciting our "time-outs"; maybe that keeps us from operating on the wrong limb or the wrong patient, but there are old complications emerging that can spell disaster for some. Here are Melissa Walton-Shirley's top six easily preventable causes of patient death and demise in 2016. [ + ]

Health and social workers often choose their profession because they want to help people. But, according to Amanda Lambros, from Curtin University, seeing trauma and suffering on a regular basis can have a deep impact on these workers. “Compassion fatigue” is a response to the stress of caring for people at times of crisis and is often referred to as the cost of caring. [ + ]