Over the past few months, I have had the privilege of taking a sabbatical in the UK, Europe and North America.
I have engaged extensively with Applied Research Centres, Academic Health Science Centres and Networks to gain insights into how they are bridging traditional boundaries between healthcare and research and embedding high quality research into healthcare.
The nature of research in healthcare is evolving rapidly. Whilst discovery research and conventional clinical trials continue to dominate the health and medical research landscape and remain foundational, rapid change is afoot encompassing:
- data science, advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence
- innovative medical technologies
- complexity, systems and implementation science for integration and improvement in healthcare delivery and experience
- consumer and community involvement moving beyond ad-hoc, duplicative often tokenistic approaches to a coordinated approach to teaching, training, supporting and integrating community
- systems approaches to take evidence into practice/policy
- workforce in both healthcare and academia are increasingly a priority, especially as the third year of the pandemic marches on. Attrition rates are high and research into changing our ways of training, working, retaining and integrating our diverse workforce is critical.
These evolving areas of research are ideally captured in the platforms of Monash Partners where we seek to enable all partners to deliver more meaningful, advanced and impactful research and improvement embedded with healthcare to maximise impact. Monash University brings world leading expertise in all these emerging fields and the challenge remains to connect, link, embed and infiltrate this capability in the frontline of healthcare delivery. This approach is also ideally aligned with the MRFF success metrics.
Working across complex partnerships and integrating across broad fields of research is both challenging and rewarding. Here partnership, relationships, commitment and inclusive leadership are key. Having recently celebrated our 10 year anniversary, Monash Partners is optimally positioned to enable, support and facilitate connection and healthcare innovation including in these new rapidly evolving research areas.
