A new advisory structure and committees has been announced to improve collaboration between the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), which will allocate a combine $1.59bn this year.
The pitch is: “this strategic move will bring together a diverse array of expertise while complementing broader work towards aligning NHMRC and MRFF funding programmes”
How it will happen: according to the NHMRC, the funds will share two principle committees;
- Research committee, to advise on “the quality and scope” of research and the “application of funding” by both agencies;
- Ethics committee, including human research guidelines;
- There will also be joint advisory committees on consumer/community involvement with grants programs;
- Industry, philanthropy, commercialisation, “to foster greater research commercialisation;”
- Public health and health systems, including to advise on embedding research translation in the health system.
It’s a hit: at least with the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes, which welcomes the plan, “with great optimism …better aligned funding will mean reduced grant duplication and administrative burden, as well as more sustainable and rewarding careers for our talented researchers”
Where this came from: It follows a year-long consideration by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care on how the two agencies should cooperate.
A discussion paper last June proposed three options. two of which involved the NHMRC in overall charge. However, a variation of the third, coordination of the separate funds, which “has low implementation complexity” is now adopted (see Campus Morning Mail June 5 2023).
So that’s that: And so ends, for now, attempts to make the MRFF an agent of the NHMRC. At the start of the MRFF there were arguments that the Council should control the cash. Back in 2015, then in Opposition Labor senators filed a minority report on a Bill creating the Fund that argued disbursements should be made by a committee added to the NHMRC structure.
“Labor Senators believe that establishing a new process entirely independent from the NHMRC has the potential to undermine the NHMRC as the preeminent, independent, independent institution from which governments takes advice about health and medical research and health and medical research grants funding is administered. Duplicating this process is also likely to be costly and inefficient,” they wrote.
It’s sort of, what has happened now, except its cooperation, not control.
