Annual spending on health and medical research is around $10bn, 25% of Australia’s total R&D. The Commonwealth wants a national strategy on where it should go and has spent a year consulting on what should be in a first-ever national plan.
Although this not the first government that has had a go. The 2013 McKeon Review came up with 21 recommendations for health and medical research, including a concept for what came to be the Medical Research Future Fund.
But a decade on, consultations with the researchers set out what they want addressed, including:
- Real research costs: “existing arrangements do not support the ‘full cost of research,’ and there is an uneven playing field between different research institutions”
- Translating research into clinical policy and commercial products: “embedding research outcomes into funding processes needs to be planned from the start, with decision-makers and end-users”
- Enhancing processes: including in data sharing, embedding research in healthcare providers and research practice, for which there is no national system. The NHMRC and MRFF need to align so as to reduce the application burden
- Research impact: “there is a commonly held view that the academic system, including research grants and academic promotions, provides incentives skewed to publications, bibliometric impact factors and further grant success”
- A workforce plan: including, career paths for ECRs and support for those who leave research
- Targeting new tech: both in research and clinical practise; did you know 23m Australians have a MyHealth Record? (well, FC is impressed).
And it recognises a perennial that that is universally acknowledged, then ignored – “a lack of workforce planning.” Higher degree research students are being trained without a secure academic research pathway (surprised? Not. The same story is told in every other discipline).
There are more consultations to come, led by Rosemary Huxtable, who is charged with developing the strategy. It will be a hard job, given there will not be enough money to address all the priorities that will be proposed, or meet the needs of all the interest groups. But none of this will be new to Ms Huxtable; she is a former head of the Department of Finance.