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 Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. It means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available exte ...

and communicating medical science to the public. She was a founding member of the

Cochrane Collaboration Cochrane is a British international charitable organisation formed to synthesize medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers. It includes ...

and worked at the

National Institute of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Servic ...

in the United States on

PubMed Health PubMed is an openly accessible, free List of academic databases and search engines, database which includes primarily the MEDLINE bibliographic database, database of references and Abstract (summary), abstracts on life sciences and Biomedicine ...

. Her other activities include

blogging A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

and drawing cartoons.

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 Bond University is Australia's first private university, private not-for-profit university and is located in Robina, Queensland, Robina on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Since its opening on 15 May 1989, Bond University has primarily been a teachi ...

in 2020 on factors affecting

systematic reviews A systematic review is a scholarly synthesis of the evidence on a clearly presented topic using critical methods to identify, define and assess research on the topic. A systematic review extracts and interprets data from published studies on ...

Career

Iain-Chalmers-and-Hilda-Bastian February-1994

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. She founded two bodies, Homebirth Australia, and the network, Maternity Alliance, 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. This led to her career in consumer health activism, especially the communication complex medical issues to the public. As a health care advocate, she was appointed to the

National Health and Medical Research Council The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the main statutory authority of the Australian Government responsible for medical research. It was the eighth largest research funding body in the world in 2016, and NHMRC-funded res ...

(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

. By 1999, Bastian had added inclusion of unpaywalled and

plain language Plain language is writing designed to ensure the reader understands as quickly, easily, and completely as possible. Plain language strives to be easy to read, understand, and use. It avoids verbose, convoluted language and jargon. In many countr ...

summaries to as a routine part of Cochrane's

. 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 The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Healthcare (IQWiG) () is a German agency responsible for assessing the quality and efficiency of medical treatments, including drugs, non-drug interventions (e.g. surgical procedures), diagnostic and sc ...

in Cologne. Moving to the USA in 2011, she worked at the

National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The NCBI is lo ...

on PubMed Health, a project focusing on clinical effectiveness and research. 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. She writes an independent blog within the PLOS Blogs Network. These are illustrated with her own cartoons. Bastian has also written for

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

, an American popular science magazine. She is a member of the editorial board of Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin. She returned to Australia in 2018.

References

External links

Official blog
at

PLOS PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched it ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bastian, Hilda Australian health activists Bond University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people)