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Resilience and rapid response— boosting Australia’s health and medical research capabilities post COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented global health challenge. It has shone a spotlight on Australia’s health and medical research resilience and capacity, with publiclyapplauded innovations in areas such as mental health, screening and vaccine development.
A recent report by Research Australia demonstrated the depth and breadth of the Australian health and medical research sector response, showcasing over 150 projects that featured: our understanding of COVID-19; development of therapies; testing and diagnostics; health systems and workforce; and community engagement.
However, significant gaps were also identified that need to be fixed to ensure a resilient health and medical research community that can not only respond rapidly, but facilitate any necessary capacity-building to respond rapidly, to future public health threats and opportunities alike.
It is clear that to inform evidence-based policy and practice requires agility and flexibility that does not reflect the natural rhythm of research, or research funding. While many individuals and organisations have managed to ‘pivot’ and re-purpose resources and staff to forge new collaborations and research opportunities, many more have not.
The limitations of our health and medical research system have seen some missed opportunities, and a widening of existing inequalities—for example an under-representation of women in research productivity (see https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/7/e002922 and https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31412-4/fulltext).
This has been due in part to the unequal distribution of domestic duties while working from home. Ethical demands and governance constraints have also created structural barriers to progressing and re-purposing grant opportunities.
COVID-19 has highlighted the need to develop a sustainable culture of researchers and research organisations that can respond to pandemics and other disruptors and identify the impact on health systems and communities as well as economic consequences. Today’s world is highly interconnected.
Australians can benefit from research that addresses emerging global threats and delivers fit-for-purpose healthcare innovations that can also be of secondary benefit to other nations. Timely collaboration across multiple organisations and sectors will ensure we are prepared to support health systems and communities and advocate for a more coordinated response.
Collaboration
In Australia, we have many demonstrated examples of strong collaborations in response to this national emergency (see https://lifeinmindaustralia.com.au/ research/australian-covid-19-suicide-research).
To facilitate collaborations going forward we recommend a coordinated approach that involves strategic planning to deliver on short-, mediumand long-term goals. Both the Commonwealth Department of Health and the Australian Academy of Science have, respectively, developed simple resource-sharing hubs in response to COVID-19, namely the Coronavirus landing page (www.health. gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus2019-ncov-health-alert) and the COVID-19 research expertise hub (www.science.org.au/covid19/news-and-resources).
A whole-of-Government approach to resource sharing, synthesis and engagement will enable Australia to rapidly capitalise on the breadth and depth of innovations that are continually developed. Sharing research hubs will advance data platforms, linkage and analytics. To advance effective collaboration, we need to foster and incentivise collaborative opportunities through research funding schemes.
Rapidly responsive research funding
Any timely new research requires resources—namely people and funding. A detailed analysis by one of the United States’ large funders, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, identified key characteristics of what they named Rapid Response Research in a special report, Rapid Response Research and Quick-Strike Analyses (see www.rwjf.org/en/library/ research/2015/05/rapid-response-research-andquick-strike-analyses.html).
To quote from the report:
The Medical Research Future Fund in Australia has responded to the need for rapid response research through quick-turnaround COVID-19-related funding announcements. We recommend expanding on this to maintain an ongoing Rapid Response Research fund, able to capitalise on natural health and medical research policy and practice situations as they arise.
We also recommend that explicit principles underpin these opportunities, based on evidence of what works, and ensuring that cross-sectoral collaboration and often-overlooked areas of research, specifically health services and systems research, are incentivised and fostered.
