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ANZUP ANNUAL REPORT 2020
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Research Highlights
Research Highlights Scientific Advisory Committee: Ian Davis and Martin Stockler
CHAIR IAN DAVIS
DEPUTY CHAIR MARTIN STOCKLER
The ANZUP Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) provides overall scientific oversight of ANZUP’s activities. It was established and is constituted to ensure that ANZUP receives strategic guidance from a broad and diverse range of disciplines, crafts, and individuals. The SAC coordinates, reviews, and prioritises research ideas through their development for ideas through to concepts and on to mature proposals and finally full research initiatives. It does so under the guidance of the ANZUP Strategic Plan 2018-2020, and provides advice to the Board to help it make strategic and operational decisions to enable those initiatives to be achieved. Meetings of the SAC allow for input and “horizon scanning” across the areas of clinical need and emerging science, to help inform development of ideas that will remain relevant to the wider community even after several years of trial conduct and analysis. The SAC is also a mechanism through which ANZUP can communicate with the various stakeholder groups and organisations represented by the SAC membership. This helps ANZUP move towards its goal of improving outcomes by generation of new evidence, and implementation of those research findings in the clinical and wider community through changes in health care policy and practice.
The ANZUP Strategic Plan 2018-2020 is due for renewal. A component of that process will involve input from the SAC, to help ensure that appropriate scientific direction is included, together with multidisciplinary inclusiveness and broad applicability and relevance of what we do. We will continue to look for areas of unmet clinical need, gaps in knowledge, emerging scientific evidence, opportunities to work creatively together, ways to involve ANZUP and the wider community more effectively, and investigate new models of care and of research that will open up further directions to pursue. The SAC agenda has increasingly moved away from a reporting and specific oversight role, functions now largely delegated to specific Trial Management Committees; to more robust and engaging processes of strategic development. Membership of the SAC is reviewed annually by the Board in the light of recommendations from the various professional bodies or special societies represented in its composition. All ANZUP members are welcome and invited to participate in ANZUP’s broader scientific processes, such as subcommittees, workshops, educational and training events, career development initiatives, and participation in our Annual Scientific Meeting. We are also open to suggestions on how to improve our systems, structures, and processes even further.
