Hilda Bastian

Hilda Bastian is a health consumer advocate who was active in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming involved in the consumer health activism movement. Moving to Europe and the USA, she has continued to be involved in evidence-based medicine and communicating medical science to the public.

Hilda Bastian
Hilda Bastian at the meeting to announce the Australasian Cochrane Centre, Canberra, Australia, February 1994
Born
Australia
OccupationConsumer health activist; scientific communication

Personal life and education

As of 1994, Bastian had no formal qualifications. However, she became interested in consumer activism and science, particularly related to health. She commenced doctoral research in 2018 into aspects of authorship and content of systematic reviews supervised by Paul Glasziou and Chris Del Mar.[1]

Career

For over 20 years she was a health consumer advocate based in Australia. She became an expert in the Australian health care system, advising doctors and policy makers in the area.[2] She founded two bodies, Homebirth Australia, and the network, Maternity Alliance,[2] 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.[3] This led to her career in consumer health activism, especially the communication complex medical issues to the public.[4]

As a health care advocate, she has taken on many roles and has been appointed to many bodies, including 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.[5] By 1999, Bastian had added inclusion of unpaywalled and plain language summaries to as a routine part of Cochrane's systematic reviews.[3]

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.[6]

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.[7] and then at PubMed Commons, an experiment in post-publication commenting on biomedical publications that started in 2013. It was discontinued in 2018 because of low levels of participation and development of alternative on-line locations for comments.[8] She writes an independent blog within the PLOS Blogs Network[9] where the views expressed are her own. These are illustrated with her own cartoons.[10]

Bastian has also written more than 30 articles for Scientific American.[11] She is a member of the editorial board of Drug and Therapeutic Bulletin.[12]

She returned to Australia in 2018.[1]

References
  1. "Absolutely maybe: evidence and uncertainties about medicine and life". PLOS. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  2. Sweet, Melissa (10 September 1994). "A Voice for the People". Sydney Morning Herald.
  3. "Doctors have decades of experience fighting "fake news." Here's how they win". Vox. Retrieved 1 April 2018.
  4. Weintraub, Karen. "Hilda Bastian: She speaks — and draws — truth to scientific power". STAT. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  5. http://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/about-hilda-bastian/
  6. "Hilda Bastian Profile Cochrane Org" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-01.
  7. Weintraub, Karen (2016-04-04). "She Speaks Truth to the Scientific Power and Draws it Too". The Boston Globe.
  8. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2018/02/01/pubmed-commons-to-be-discontinued/
  9. "2. Independent blogs hosted by PLOS". About PLOS blogs. PLOS. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  10. https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/
  11. https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/hilda-bastian/
  12. "Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin". BMJ Journals. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
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