The most astonishing bungle for a good while emerged from the Department of Health (DoHA) last week.
Here is some of the coverage:
Thousands of dollars worth of anatomically bungled posters to be shredded
4th Oct 2012
ABORIGINAL health posters riddled with errors are destined for the paper shredder, leaving taxpayers thousands of dollars out of pocket.
The federal health department has put out an immediate recall on 171 A3-sized posters of the female anatomy produced as part of the Labor government's Live Longer campaign and sent to Indigenous health services across the country.
Opposition Indigenous health spokesman Andrew Laming said the posters were a "fiasco", with embarrassing errors such as the lungs labelled stomach, an extra pancreas and ovaries labelled kidneys, along with arrows in the wrong places.
"The oesophagus runs into the lung," Dr Laming said in a statement on Wednesday. "The ureters look like they join to the small intestine instead of the kidneys and the bladder is sitting on top of the uterus."
More here:
The best image is associated with this link:
Health Dept withdraws inaccurate anatomy posters
By chief political correspondent Simon Cullen
Updated
The Federal Health Department has been forced to withdraw one of its Aboriginal health posters after it was revealed to contain embarrassing errors about basic human organs.
The poster, titled Female Human Anatomy, confuses the stomach with the lungs and incorrectly labels the ovaries as kidneys.
It also has an arrow pointing to the intestine, but instead calls it the stomach. The poster also shows two pancreases.
The poster is part of the Government's Living Longer program aimed at improving the health outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
It was taken down from the campaign's website today.
Opposition Indigenous health spokesman Andrew Laming says the campaign has been "severely undermined" by the errors.
"The lack of any attention to detail in these posters is an insult to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders that were the target audience for this material," Dr Laming said.
Image is here:
Here is a detailed description of many of the errors.
Pulp fiction: body of evidence leaves officials red-faced
- by: Adam Cresswell, Health editor
- From: The Australian
- October 04, 2012
IS your heart in the right place? Most Australians would think so but, if you happen to be female, bad news - it seems the federal government would respectfully like to disagree.
According to a health education poster prepared by the federal Department of Health and Ageing and distributed to health centres across the country, the female heart is located dead centre in the chest, not displaced to the left side.
But that's not the half of it, as the poster - 2000 copies of which were printed as part of a $21.3 million health promotion campaign launched last month - shows someone in the department has some decidedly weird ideas about the placement of women's body parts generally.
According to the full-colour poster, which forms part of a "Community Health Action Pack" and is sized halfway between A4 and A3, what men call the stomach becomes one of the lungs when it gets into women, while the female stomach is hidden somewhere in the small intestines.
Women seem to have sprouted an extra pancreas, cunningly disguised as the right kidney, while the kidneys have upped sticks and taken up residence where the ovaries should be.
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Why I raise this is simple. It shows just how detached and ignorant of practical health information are the vast majority of those who work at DoHA. That such an error filled poster could escape into the public domain is just extraordinary.
And this is the Department that is bringing you the NEHRS! What hope can we possibly have for Australian E-Health when this lot is in charge. The lack of connection with the clinical workface is obvious and dangerous!
Keeping properly informed and educated staff away from posters is one thing but from the NEHRS is a disaster in the making. Surely any proper Health Department would have processes to conduct a clinical sanity check on any documentation it issues. The same thing is needed, and appears to be absent, from the NEHRS program the way it is being handled.
This would be extraordinarily funny if the implications were not so serious!
This would be extraordinarily funny if the implications were not so serious!
David.