Hilda Bastian

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Hilda Bastian
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Hilda Bastian
Born
Australia
OccupationConsumer health activist; scientific communication

Hilda Bastian is a health consumer advocate. Starting in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s and moving to Europe and the USA, she is involved in evidence-based medicine and communicating medical science to the public.

Contents

She was a founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration and worked at the National Institute of Health in the United States on PubMed Health. [1] Her other activities include blogging and drawing cartoons. [1]

Personal life and education

In 1994, Bastian had no formal qualifications. However, she became interested in consumer activism and science, particularly related to health. She completed a PhD from Bond University in 2020 on factors affecting systematic reviews. [2]

Career

Bastian spent 20 years as a health consumer advocate in Australia. She became an expert in the Australian health care system, advising doctors and policy makers in the area. [3] She founded two bodies, Homebirth Australia, and the network, Maternity Alliance, [3] advocating for more homebirths in Australia. Later Bastian learned that at this time in Australia, infant mortalities were higher from homebirths than births in hospital. [4] This led to her career in consumer health activism, especially the communication complex medical issues to the public. [5]

As a health care advocate, she was appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) committee and the Australian Gastroenterology Institute. Apart from the earlier maternity bodies, Bastian was a member of the founding board of the Consumers’ Health Forum of Australia, and the Cochrane Collaboration. [6] By 1999, Bastian had added inclusion of unpaywalled and plain language summaries to as a routine part of Cochrane's systematic reviews. [4]

She left Australia to work in Germany in 2004 and became Head of the Health Information Department at the newly formed German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care in Cologne. [7]

Moving to the USA in 2011, she worked at the National Center for Biotechnology Information on PubMed Health, a project focusing on clinical effectiveness and research. [8] and then at PubMed Commons, an experiment in post-publication commenting on biomedical publications that started in 2013 and discontinued in 2018 because of low levels of participation and development of alternative on-line locations for comments. [9] She writes an independent blog within the PLOS Blogs Network. [10] These are illustrated with her own cartoons. [11]

Bastian has also written for Scientific American, an American popular science magazine. [12] She is a member of the editorial board of Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin. [13]

She returned to Australia in 2018. [2]

Related Research Articles

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.

Cochrane Library Collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties

The Cochrane Library is a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of medical research. The Cochrane Library aims to make the results of well-conducted controlled trials readily available and is a key resource in evidence-based medicine.

PLOS Biology is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003. It was the first journal of the Public Library of Science. The editor-in-chief is Nonia Pariente.

Home birth An attended or an unattended childbirth in a non-clinical setting

A home birth is a birth that takes place in a residence rather than in a hospital or a birthing center. They may be attended by a midwife, or lay attendant with experience in managing home births. Home birth was, until the advent of modern medicine, the de facto method of delivery. The term was coined in the middle of the 19th century as births began to take place in hospitals.

PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.

Mind–body interventions (MBI) or mind-body training (MBT) are health and fitness interventions that are supposed to work on a physical and mental level such as yoga, tai chi, and Pilates.

Faculty of 1000 is a publisher of services for life scientists and clinical researchers. It was acquired by Taylor & Francis Group in January 2020.

A health or medical library is designed to assist physicians, health professionals, students, patients, consumers, medical researchers, and information specialists in finding health and scientific information to improve, update, assess, or evaluate health care. Medical libraries are typically found in hospitals, medical schools, private industry, and in medical or health associations. A typical health or medical library has access to MEDLINE, a range of electronic resources, print and digital journal collections, and print reference books. The influence of open access (OA) and free searching via Google and PubMed has a major impact on the way medical libraries operate.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

PLOS Genetics is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal established in 2005 and published by the Public Library of Science. The founding editor-in-chief was Wayne N. Frankel. The current editors-in-chief are Gregory S. Barsh and Gregory P. Copenhaver. The journal covers research on all aspects of genetics and genomics.

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Medical literature

Medical literature is the scientific literature of medicine: articles in journals and texts in books devoted to the field of medicine. Many references to the medical literature include the health care literature generally, including that of dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, nursing, and the allied health professions.

Index Medicus (IM) is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, Index Medicus was a comprehensive bibliographic index of such articles in the form of a print index or its onscreen equivalent. Medical history experts have said of Index Medicus that it is “America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge.”

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Alessandro Liberati was an Italian healthcare researcher and clinical epidemiologist, and founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre.

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References

  1. 1 2 "Hilda Bastian: She speaks–and draws–truth to scientific power". NLM in Focus. 16 May 2016. Retrieved 6 December 2020.
  2. 1 2 "Absolutely maybe: evidence and uncertainties about medicine and life". PLOS. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  3. 1 2 Sweet, Melissa (10 September 1994). "A Voice for the People". Sydney Morning Herald.
  4. 1 2 "Doctors have decades of experience fighting "fake news." Here's how they win". Vox. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  5. ↑ Weintraub, Karen (April 2016). "Hilda Bastian: She speaks — and draws — truth to scientific power". STAT. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  6. ↑ "About Hilda Bastian".
  7. ↑ "Hilda Bastian Profile Cochrane Org" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-01.
  8. ↑ Weintraub, Karen (2016-04-04). "She Speaks Truth to the Scientific Power and Draws it Too". The Boston Globe.
  9. ↑ "PubMed Commons to be Discontinued". February 2018.
  10. ↑ "2. Independent blogs hosted by PLOS". About PLOS blogs. PLOS. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  11. ↑ "Absolutely Maybe - Evidence and uncertainties about medicine, science culture, and life".
  12. ↑ "Stories by Hilda Bastian". Scientific American .
  13. ↑ "Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin". BMJ Journals. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
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