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NSW Regional Health Partners is one of only two accredited Centres for Innovation in Regional Health (CIRH) and is focused on implementing knowledge in regional, rural and remote health services.
Healthy Regional Communities Program
The Healthy Regional Communities (HRC) Program is a “grassroots” community-based research translation and implementation program that develops innovative models of care and health promotion within communities, evaluates the models, then moves to scale-up and rollout if proven effective. The Healthy Regional Communities Program focuses on projects in locations where partners are aware of high priority health issues that lend themselves to research solutions. Key elements within this nationally unique program are:
Cross-sectoral partnerships with agriculture, mining and community sectors provide a unique collaborative environment for the Healthy Regional Communities Program, in which innovative models of care are developed with public, patient, government and industry engagement to address not only health needs, but also the broader socio-economic underpinnings of disadvantage and disease risk.
Translation Research Programs
The Translational Research Programs are underpinned by national competitive research funding and are led by our high performing clinical academics. They focus on our areas of traditional discovery research strengths and have embedded internationally recognised research teams and priority research centres. These research teams link to the Centre’s clinical services in both hospital care and population health. The result is world-class discovery research in biomedical, clinical and population health linked with expertise in implementation science, that is embedded within the direct care delivery process. The clinical academic leaders have key leadership roles in Clinical Networks, Streams and the PHN, ensuring research is strongly embedded within healthcare delivery.
Clinician Priority Research Program
The Clinician Initiated Priority Research Program (CIPR) is the Centre’s “grassroots” clinical quality improvement program. An environmental scan of the region’s major tertiary teaching hospitals and the broader clinical community has identified barriers to implementation and sustainability of quality improvement initiatives. Barriers included: a lack of available expertise in research methodology and design; a lack of small grant funding to obtain proof of concept; and a lack of clinician time to engage in research and quality leadership.
The Clinician Initiated Priority Research Program aims to facilitate activities across the spectrum, from smaller scale clinical audits to more complex projects such as cohort studies or randomised trials. It is supported by four main initiatives:
In particular, clinician-driven research is supported by the nationally unique programs: the RICH Workshops and the Integrated Care Collaborative Program. These programs support the co-design of both research and quality improvement projects aiming to foster clinician engagement in research and implementation, bring important clinical questions to the attention of appropriate pre-clinical research groups, and allow the implementation scientists to investigate new models of knowledge transfer. Competitive small project grants provide the incentive for both clinicians and researchers to engage and interact to develop clinically-relevant research questions.
The Programs are underpinned by the Research Support Platforms that allow best-evidence based continuous improvement in health care, and larger scale comparative effectiveness research driven by the Centre partners. Read more about these platforms here.
