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Empathy is an important modifiable quality of health care practitioners that relates to the quality of patient care. The educative process may adversely affect the empathy levels of health care students at key phases of training. This topic remains unexplored in chiropractic students to date. A voluntary and anonymous questionnaire was distributed to all chiropractic students in an Australian university-based program in April 2021. This questionnaire recorded age, sex, year of study, and Toronto Empathy Questionnaire scores. Chiropractic student empathy scores approximated those of other Australian health care students. No statistical differences were found when comparing the mean scores of empathy levels across the 5 student cohorts. The empathy levels of female chiropractic students' were significantly higher than those of the male chiropractic students. This study provides a baseline from which further explorations on empathy may be conducted in chiropractic students. This holds the potential to improve practitioners' quality of life and patient outcomes and for educators to identify subject matter that may negatively affect empathy levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The defining moment for gun control in Australia and in its smallest state, Tasmania, was the April 1996 massacre at Port Arthur when 35 people were shot dead and 18 injured. By 1998 each state had enacted tighter laws with respect to licensing, compulsory registration and storage requirements, together with bans on military and military style rifles and shotguns. Surprisingly there was little data or published studies available justifying the introduction of these new laws. Australia is thus in the curious position where policy change and law reform occurred before data collection and analysis. Subsequently, there have been two major studies: The first, released in 2004, concluded that dramatic reductions in firearm-related deaths had been achieved as a result of the legislative reforms. In 2005, the Tasmanian Auditor-General produced a Special Report which examined hospital admissions for gun trauma, thefts of firearms, and statistics regarding the use of firearms to commit violent crime and suicide. While these studies have been used to ensure that the laws are not watered down, they have also identified some areas where enforcement and compliance can be improved, providing fertile ground for further public interest advocacy by gun control groups in Tasmania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]