Professor Debra Anderson signing Heart Foundation agreement
How would you describe research in the Faculty of Health?
At the Faculty of Health, we’re having an impact on improving the lives of those in our communities. We achieve this by being well-connected, collaborative and highly engaged with the heath sector. A lot of the research that’s going on is working across the faculty to answer the pressing questions for the health of our community.
The thing that we’re strong at in the faculty is the pointy end – what I’d describe as clinical translation and implementation. When you think across the lifecycle of research, we’re really good at putting it into practice – testing out and evaluating the translation and implementation of research, and influencing policy and clinical practice.
What are some of the areas that the faculty excels in?
We’ve got a few key areas that are real strengths of the faculty. The first is around palliative, cancer, aged and chronic care, where we’re world leaders in working with people at the end of life, with cancer and in aged care. The other area where we’re strong is stuttering research, and we have the Australian Stuttering Research Centre who are global leaders leading some amazing research.
We’ve got some focused and clinically relevant areas as well. In nursing and midwifery research, we’re ranked number 1 in Australia and have very strong research going on with our partners which is leading the way in informing nursing and midwifery practice. Another area is our work on type 2 diabetes, and we have a collaboration forming that’s looking at health and diabetes type 2. We’ve got so many other specialisations including stroke health, psychology, high performance exercise and sport, public health and women’s health.
What are some of the most exciting research projects being undertaken at the moment?
One of the very exciting projects is one that we’re pulling together with expertise from across the university, looking into developing a sustainable model of care for older people with cancer. Led by Professors Meera Agar in IMPACCT, it’s pulling together our strengths from palliative care, aged care, health economics and business.
Another is a fascinating project in our exercise and sports science area, led by Dr Hugh Fullagar. They’re working with Fire and Rescue NSW to better understand heat stress and the relationship to exercise. It’s a different way of thinking about how our research can make an impact in communities.
What are the health faculty research priorities for the year ahead?
There are a few new things we’re looking to bring into the mix that we haven’t had before in the faculty.
We’ve got a new partnership with the Heart Foundation that we recently announced, so we’re moving towards developing a suite of projects under that, with a focus on women and heart disease. This is a pilot and we’re also looking to build other similar partnerships and build on them.
We’re forming a Health Research Institute (HRI) to pull together all the different people across the university and link them up with health practitioners. Together, we can then focus on those complex and significant problems, and bring together the research teams to answer the big hairy questions. I can’t see how we can do that on our own. If we want to make a meaningful contribution in health, we need to pull together our strengths and collaborate across the university and with our industry partners to meet the health challenges that are proliferating in our rapidly changing world. The HRI will be an enabler and incubator pan-university.
We’re also looking at a few things in how we work. We’re increasing our digital and social media presence to showcase the research that we’re doing and link it together better. We’re looking at new ways to communicate and influence. We’re developing our pipeline of researchers: all of our experienced researchers in the faculty now need to be mentoring early career researchers to really develop a pipeline of emerging strong researchers in the faculty as we move forward. We’re getting very good at tenders, where we’ve purposefully improved our skills in tendering and getting money from other sources. And we’re continuing to leverage our national and international health priorities and align our strengths to them.
Last year, we went over and above our KPIs despite COVID-19, and we’ve already hit our 2021 targets by mid-year. The strategies that we’ve put in place are purposeful and meaningful, and we’re taking a thoughtful approach to supporting and maintaining high quality research. We’re really starting to the see the exciting results.
