Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
What’s keeping Australia’s health researchers awake at night?
That was the question to be answered by some of Australia’s leading health funding bodies and thinkers on a panel in Adelaide last week.
The answers covered problems like stresses on the health system, climate change, the need for investment in innovation, ageing and population growth and integrating consumers into research.
“I do think, and this does keep me up at night, I do think we tend to be very safe in our funding, very conservative, and perhaps lack the abilities to identify the truly innovative opportunities that should be funded,” says Professor Steve Wesselingh, chief executive officer of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).
Wesselingh was speaking during the panel “Navigating the next decade: what does the future hold for health and medical research?” at the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (AAHMS) 2024 Annual Meeting.
Panellists were asked: what’s keeping you up at night right now, in the context of the next 10 years?
From the perspective of a funding body, Wesselingh posed the question: “Are we funding the right things that are going to allow us, particularly Australia, to lead in the areas that we need to lead?”
Wesselingh highlighted examples where he thinks this has been done better, such as the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and the Discovery Research strategic programme of the Wellcome Trust, which aims to fund “bold and creative discovery research” with the potential to improve human life, health and wellbeing.
“I do think as a country, and actually as a funder, we probably need to think about high-risk, high-gain research,” he says.
Wesselingh says he is “very concerned” that Australia will fall behind the rest of the world in terms of innovation, technologies, and new ideas.
“We’re very good at digging things out of the ground and sending them overseas, but there are countries like South Korea and Germany and other countries that are clearly investing in innovation and do it way better than we are. And we will just fall behind.
“I do think that science will underpin sustainability of countries like Australia.”
How the health system is preparing for future stresses concerns another panelist, Professor Michael Kidd, director of the Centre for Future Health Systems at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“My new role is as a health futurist. So, I get to look at a crystal ball and think about where our health systems might be in 10 years, what research do we need to be doing now to get there, and the work that we need to do with our policy makers,” he says.
“There are things which concern me about future stresses on our health systems. The impact of climate change … How well are our health systems preparing for climate migration, increasing heat stress or environmental emergencies?
The impacts of climate change on healthcare and healthcare’s environmental footprint were explored in a series of talks during the AAHMS Annual Meeting.
“How well are we preparing for the ageing population? And indeed, the increase in the size of our population?” Kidd adds.
“And how well are we learning the lessons from COVID-19 pandemic and applying those [lessons] into our health systems reforms both here in Australia and around the world?”
Another panellist, Gillian Mason, a healthcare consumer representative, clinician-researcher, and head of research program at the National Disability Research Partnership, says there is an opportunity to leverage the community knowledge and lived experience of consumers.
However, with the advances in centring the consumer in all ways, she worries that “we’re going to only allow that [to happen] in a way where we assimilate people who live very different lives, speak different languages, have different priorities.”
“We’ll allow them to be included, but only if they will come and work with us in meetings … I think we can be much more creative and draw on other industries and other settings where collaborative work looks different.”
Mason points to research institutions in which she has been involved where an “all the time” way of being engaged with the community is implemented instead.
“I think we need to be better at hanging out as humans with people, and just knowing, what [life is like] for people who live with the conditions that we’re researching, or access the systems that we’re researching, or in the communities that we’re trying to improve the health of.”
She advocates for a change of mindset for health and medical researchers so that “we’re thinking about the community and consumers as part of the team making the discoveries … Rather than only the recipients or end users, especially when we’re talking about communities who are experiencing the worst health.”
Cosmos is an official media partner of the AAHMS Annual Meeting. You can read other articles on digital health transformation, responsible AI integration in healthcare, and AI fairness.
