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Welcome to Dr. Warrick’s Podcast Channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believed educated patients to get the best healthcare.  Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care, and how this might apply to you or someone you love.
Warrick Bishop:                Hi, my name’s Dr. Warrick Bishop, and I’d like to welcome you to my podcast channel. Today I have the absolute privilege of interviewing James Nevile from Amcal, he’s a senior pharmacist there. In fact, he’s been in the pharmaceutical industry for over 20 years, with extensive experience providing the highest level of trusted advice for Australians. He’s passionate about providing the best possible advice and information to Australians and continuing this mission for many years to come.
James, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here today, and welcome, and hello.
James Nevile:                    Thanks for having me on, Warrick. It’s great to be here.
Warrick Bishop:                Look, I’m really excited to have you here, and I’m very excited to talk about Amcal’s 2018 Heart Health Initiative. Can you tell me a little bit about what initiatives Amcal are following through right at this very moment?
James Nevile:                    Right now, what we’ve got running in the pharmacies is a range of activities. The main one that you’ve alluded to there is our Healthy Heart campaign, and this is about trying to prompt some action from Australians to get them thinking about their heart health, and potentially get them proactively starting to manage some of their risk factors and re-engaging with their GP and other healthcare professionals.
Warrick Bishop:                Look, I think engagement and encouragement are fundamental in terms of moving people towards better healthcare. I understand that Amcal have been involved in some surveys, and it’s certainly shown some differences between the sexes. Would you like to tell me a bit about that?
James Nevile:                    Yeah, absolutely right, Warrick. Amcal’s research reveals that Australian men are almost sort of putting their lives at risk by failing to proactively manage their own health. In fact, what the research showed that was over 40% of men said it would take a life-threatening health scare for them to start to take their health seriously and get proactive.
Warrick Bishop:                Yeah, it’s a scary bit of research that, and I have to say that it seems counter-intuitive when a lot of the blokes I know will go out of their way to make sure that their outboard motor is well serviced, so that when they go out fishing they don’t have a calamity or a disaster, yet when it comes to their own health, there’s a real blind spot there.
James Nevile:                    That’s exactly right. I mean, it seems to be that we’re much more focused on our boats and our cars than we are on our own heart, which is really, disturbing.
Warrick Bishop:                It certainly is, but even beyond the individual, what sort of impact is this having on the families because I understand some of your survey questions were around the impact this could have on family members.
James Nevile:                    Yeah indeed, so many of the younger generation were worried about their fathers and thought that ‘Hey, maybe they won’t be around long enough to see their grandkids grow up.’ Sadly, some of these concerns are warranted given that one in four of the millennial generation said that they’ve lost a parent to heart disease already.
Warrick Bishop: