Foreword

Professor Vlado Perkovic Dean, Faculty of Medicine & Health, UNSW Sydney

SPHERE has always been centred around creating better health outcomes for our communities. Yes, the research that our partners do together is cutting-edge, but the goal is developing workable solutions to the biggest health challenges that our communities face.

UNSW Sydney is one of the founding partners of SPHERE, and seven years in, the focus on patient outcomes clearly remains. Across our Clinical Academic Groups (CAGs) and key strategic programs, we are already seeing innovative programs and tools become available to our clinicians and to the broader community.

This highlights a key goal of SPHERE, and its strongest opportunity. There is already much research undertaken by scientists, clinicians, administrators, and many other players in health, so why do we need SPHERE? And these existing research activities often address issues that lead to better health outcomes, but are they the MOST important issues? And is the investment our community has made through our national and state schemes being optimally used?

SPHERE brings together several health services, Universities and Medical Research Institutes. It offers a clear pathway to understand the needs of our health services, and the broader community, to prioritise the most important research that we can do, and then to ensure that the knowledge identified through this research is optimally implemented.

To achieve these outcomes, it is critical to bring together patients, clinicians, researchers, administrators, and many others in research groups. This is the fundamental purpose of the Clinical Academic Groups and there are many examples where this has proven successful.

But we must do more. A specific focus on including patient voices, linking with clinicians and managers, and including the groups who will need to implement findings of research, will lead to faster and more effective translation. This is ultimately what SPHERE is all about.

There are some great initiatives underway. For example, being patientcentred means listening to the community and the Consumer and Community Involvement Group has been established to help achieve this. I can also see other initiatives across the Partnership to involve the community in our research and its translation.

SPHERE’s translational focus has also been empowering for our researchers and our clinicians. Working in multi-disciplinary teams and moving agilely between bench and bedside, they are ensuring that their discoveries and innovations reach patients.

Another benefit of being part of SPHERE is the possibility of previously unconnected groups working together in new ways. Some of these collaborations have been quite unexpected – like the Topsy Turvy project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare leaders partnered with artists to translate their diverse experiences of the pandemic through drawings, text, and sound.

I was pleased to see SPHERE’s strengths recognised when we were recently re-accredited by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) as a Research Translation Centre. The NHMRC recognises Research Translation Centres as providing collaboration between health care, research and education organisations and driving translation of health and medical research. This is an acknowledgement of the strength of the joint efforts of SPHERE partners to serve our community.

Please enjoy this issue of InSPHERE where we showcase some of the individuals and groups contributing to the strength of the partnership, and better solutions for the people of NSW, and do keep contributing. We have much to do together.