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A new model of collaborative research: experiences from one of Australia’s NHMRC Partnership Centres for Better Health

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posted on 2023-04-19, 07:02 authored by Sonia Wutske, Sally Redman, Adrian Bauman, Penelope Hawe, Alan ShiellAlan Shiell, Sarah Thackway, Andrew Wilson

There is often a disconnection between the creation of evidence and its use in policy and practice. Cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary partnership research, founded on shared governance and coproduction, is considered to be one of the most effective means of overcoming this research-policy-practice disconnect. Similar to a number of funding bodies internationally, Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council has introduced Partnership Centres for Better Health: a scheme explicitly designed to encourage coproduced partnership research. In this paper, we describe our experiences of The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, established in June 2013 to explore the systems, strategies and structures that inform decisions about how to prevent lifestyle-related chronic disease. We present our view on how the Partnership Centre model is working in practice. We comment on the unique features of the Partnership Centre funding model, how these features enable ways of working that are different from both investigator-initiated and commissioned research, and how these ways of working can result in unique outcomes that would otherwise not have been possible. Although not without challenges, the Partnership Centre approach addresses a major gap in the Australian research environment, whereby large-scale, research-policy-practice partnerships are established with sufficient time, resources and flexibility to deliver highly innovative, timely and accessible research that is of use to policy and practice.

Funding

The Prevention Centre is funded through the NHMRC Partnership Centre grant scheme (grant ID: GNT9100001) with the Australian Government Department of Health, the NSW Ministry of Health, ACT Health and the HCF Research Foundation. The authors would like to thank all the project teams that are undertaking the research we have commented on in this article.

History

Publication Date

2017-02-15

Journal

Public Health Research and Practice

Volume

27

Issue

1

Article Number

e2711706

Pagination

6p. (p. 1-6)

Publisher

Sax Institute

ISSN

2204-2091

Rights Statement

© 2017 Wutzke et al. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms. See: www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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