Managing Medical Misinformation
About
Please note the April The Cairns Group GP event is being held in March due to the Easter break and school holidays.Join fellow GPs for a practical, solutions focused conversation about navigating misinformation and disinformation in modern practice. We’ll explore how inaccurate or misleading information enters the consult room - from patients, clinicians, media, social media, and emerging AI tools - and how it shapes clinical encounters.
Key themes:
• Misinformation vs disinformation: what we’re seeing and why it matters
• Inside the consult: patient beliefs, clinician knowledge gaps, and maintaining trust
• Outside influences: media narratives, social platforms, AI generated content
• Combatting misinformation: our role, time pressures, and effective phraseology
A collaborative session designed to share experiences, refine communication strategies, and strengthen evidence based care in a complex information landscape. Whilst facilitated by two global leaders in the field, you as GPs are the experts and this session is designed to be collaborative, reflective, and grounded in the realities of general practice. Bring your experiences, your frustrations, your wins, and your questions. Together, we’ll build strategies that protect patient safety, strengthen therapeutic relationships, and support GPs navigating an increasingly complex information landscape.
Dr Tonia Marquardt MBBS, FAFPHM, FRACGP, FACRRM, MPH
Tonia Marquardt is a public health physician who has worked in a range of remote and developing contexts throughout her career. Over the last 25 years she has spent time working with Medecins Sans Frontieres on various projects, including relating to HIV in Malawi and to refugees and internally displaced people in Liberia, Darfur and Bangladesh. She has responded to multiple disease outbreaks (cholera, measles, meningitis) in the course of those projects, as well as to measles in Uganda and Ebola in South Sudan. As a women’s health advisor, she has supported activities in multiple locations, including Nigeria, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Philippines. She has also spent time as a regional medical lead on projects dealing with hepatitis C in Cambodia, tuberculosis in Papua New Guinea and leishmaniasis in Pakistan. Tonia has spent many years in far North Queensland, where she worked in retrieval medicine and primary health care with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, mostly in Cape York. During this time, Tonia obtained dual fellowships in General Practice and Rural and Remote Medicine. She was part of the editorial team for the first Chronic Conditions Manual. Recently, Tonia has been working in Queensland Public Health Units as she completed her physician training; her roles included responding to communicable diseases such as COVID-19, melioidosis, meningitis and diphtheria. She also supported the Rheumatic Heart Register team and worked on the addition of acute post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis to the list of nationally notifiable diseases.
Prof Ronny Gunnarsson
An adjunct professor at the college of medicine and dentistry at JCU and professor emeritus in general practice at the school of public health and community medicine at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, he has also been a general practitioner for more than 30 years. During these years he engaged in research with topics usually found within primary health care. The first area of interest was upper respiratory tract infections with focus on diagnosing the sore throat. A consequence was further research about the clinical value of diagnostic tests. Example of other areas of research interest is the transition from childhood to adulthood, whiplash-associated disorders (WAD), doctor’s behaviour, assessment of the consultation, low back pain, building prediction models, evaluating interventions in randomized controlled trials and supervision of PhD students.
In addition to evidence-based healthcare his passion is to lower the threshold for people to start doing research and to build infrastructure to facilitate research. All health care organisations benefits from having a fair proportion of their staff actively engaged in research.
Join us from 6.00pm for a light refreshments at JCU's The Yeinie Building at 11-13 Charles St Cairns North.
Date
Tuesday 31 March 2026 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC+10)Location
The Yeinie Building
11-13 Charles Street, Cairns North
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Managing Medical Misinformation
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