Progress report on application assessments in 2010 round.

Project Grants

NHMRC would like to thank all those researchers who have, agreed to provide external assessments of Project Grant applications (over 5400 as of 27th July, 2010). External assessments are crucial to NHMRC’s annual consideration of grant applications for projects.

The 2010 Grant Review Panels begin to sit next week, in our Canberra Offices from (2 August and 10 September). Thirty five panels will assess the 3344 applications submitted this year. Holding the GRP meetings in our own offices in Canberra means that we can better support the panels during their deliberations which are so central to Australia’s health and medical research effort. The panels have on average 95 applications to assess. At the beginning of their meetings, the panels will remove from further discussion those applications where the assessments (spokespersons and external assessors) indicate that they are not competitive against the field this year. This is likely to be, averaged over all the GRPs, around 30% of all applications, based on experience over the last decade. Since our prediction is that less than 25% of applications will be able to be funded this year, this process will allow our GRPs to concentrate on the assessment and ranking of grants that have some prospect of being funded.

This year, the external assessments will be presented to the GRPs by the Second Spokesperson for the grant, who will also provide NHMRC with a score of the usefulness of the assessment. As for last year, we will publish a list (honour role!) of all those who provide external assessments in 2010. This will aid Universities and other research institutes to take into account service to research through NHMRC peer review in promotions and appointments, if they wish.

This year, panel chairs will be drawn from senior staff with research training and experience from the Office of NHMRC and from the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing. Others will be from nominations received from the New Zealand Health Research Council and senior Australian researchers without potential conflicts of interest. This approach builds on 2009 GRP experience, when NHMRC senior staff chaired to avoid conflicts of interest of Chairs, especially when that would have resulted in low numbers of GRP members being in the room for voting. It also addresses the concerns of the Australian National Audit Office report, which highlighted concerns about conflicts of interest on GRPs, especially those of the Chairs, particularly where conflicts of interest were an unavoidable consequence of the relatively small pool of researchers available to assess applications in specialist areas.

NHMRC Fellowships

NHMRC Research Fellowship scheme received 219 applications this year. The Fellowships review panels met in June and interviewed 141 Fellowship applications. A breakdown of applications in given below.

Career Development Awards

This year, a total of 428 applications were received, and the breakdown into the four different schemes of the CDA Fellowships is given below.

Practitioner Fellowships

NHMRC offers Practitioner Fellowships to researchers who also provide patient care through employment in the health system. This year 19 applications were received for Level 1 and 11 for Level 2. These Fellowships are one route whereby talented and dedicated clinicians can combine patient care and research. They are therefore an important component of NHMRC’s efforts to ensure that Australia’s health system is, in the words of the report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, able to be “agile and self-improving”. They are key to Australia’s research translation capability. But we can do more.

RGMS – status report

New Research Help Centre

We have launched the new Research Help Centre (RHC) on 12 July 2010. The RHC will provide a more responsive and 'one stop shop' approach to assistance for applicants, including:

• advice on how to use the NHMRC’s Research Grants Management System (RGMS)
• information about peer review policies and guidelines
• support for researchers and institutions applying for all forms of research funding
• access to information on research funding opportunities.

You can call the RHC on 1800 500 983 or email at help@nhmrc.gov.au.

We are currently revising the RGMS section of the NHMRC website to provide better access to information on RGMS (including a new monthly newsletter – RGMS Update), the Help Centre, and other useful information.

RGMS Improvements

Performance: During the last 6 months, we have been getting expert technical advice on how to ensure the performance of RGMS during periods of heavy load. NHMRC is currently working to implement these improvements to the infrastructure and database to optimise access to commonly used database queries. In May we installed a new server with increased capacity and we are currently considering further infrastructure improvements to provide better backup and expandability.

Useability: We have also been considering all feedback received from RGMS users, including through the NHMRC Tracker 11 June 2010 RGMS User Reference Group and the focus groups. This feedback will help us improve the useability of RGMS through providing simplified and clearer processes. We would like to thank all users who have taken the time to provide NHMRC with constructive feedback on RGMS.

We are continually monitoring performance and seeking feedback through the 2010 peer review process including GRPs.

NHMRC Workshops

NHMRC has begun a new series of workshops, held in our Canberra Offices. Recent workshops have included

• Conflicts of interest
• Researcher career development
• Global health
• Evidence to improve mental health

Forthcoming workshops include:

• Evidence in Primary Care: Research, Research Translation and Improved Outcomes for Patients
• Financial Benefits of Health and Medical Research; and
• Advanced Health Care Centres Concept.

Workshops are advertised through NHMRC’s fortnightly NHMRC Tracker newsletter. Click here to subscribe to NHMRC Tracker.

New NHMRC Strategic Plan

NHMRC thanks all those who contributed to discussion of the draft Strategy for Health and Medical Research, circulated for comment June 2009. Following the Minister for Health and Ageing, the Honourable Nicola Roxon approving the Plan for forwarding to Parliament, it was tabled on 25 May 2010.

Download the NHMRC Strategic Plan

Our strategy for the triennium reflects our diverse roles under our Act, with our objectives to:

Objective 1   Raise the standard of individual and public health throughout Australia.
Objective 2   Foster the development of consistent standards between the various states and territories.
Objective 3   Foster medical research and training and public health research and training.
Objective 4   Foster consideration of ethical issues relating to health.
Objective 5   Build a better NHMRC.

In the support of research and training under Objective 3, our strategy is:

• Support for highest quality research, investing in research most likely to yield new knowledge through independent research initiated by talented, well trained researchers.
• Support for research translation, to improve personal and community health, and grow innovative industries.. Supporting funding schemes to facilitate research findings into improved policy and practice, and commercialisation.
• Building Australia’s future research capacity, through early and mid-career Fellowships, and the NHMRC Fellowships scheme. Supporting, renewing and widening Australia’s pool of talented new researchers, from early training through to their most productive years.
• Being a good international citizen, contributing to the development of health knowledge worldwide and improving the health in our region.
• Support for the four research pillars, biomedical, clinical, public health and health services research.
• Continual improvement in peer review, to provide the highest quality, fair and transparent review mechanism possible.

Our Act also requires us to identify each triennium the major health issues and how we will address them. In the new Strategic Plan, we have identified these as Indigenous health and well-being, ageing, chronic disease, mental health, genomic medicine and frontier technologies, emerging infectious disease threats, investigating alternative therapies claims, global health, health consequences of climate change, and building a self-improving health system.

Across all these areas, we will take into account prevention, the needs and roles of all parts of the health system, the needs of rural and remote Australia, and Indigenous Australians, the socio-economics effect, health literacy, and international best practices.

Finally, our Act also requires us to develop a national plan for health and medical research. Here, we have identified the following major headings.

• How to better develop our national capacity strategically to create new knowledge. While NHMRC is the single largest funder of health and medical research in Australia, there are many other players including the charitable funding bodies, philanthropy, the research conducting organisations including Universities, medical research institutes and hospitals (all of which are also involved in research training) and the State and Territory governments.
• The health and medical research workforce. What is Australia’s need for health and medical research workforce for the next decade, indeed for the next several decades? It takes a long time to identify, education, training and develop both our full time research workforce, and the many tens of thousands of people who conduct research in conjunction with other roles (teaching and education, professional development, clinical care, policy development and more).
• Promoting translation and implementation. As attention around the world turns increasingly to an emphasis on both discovery and translation in health research, we need strategies here to ensure that we benefit from the outstanding research conducted in this country – benefit in prevention, in better care for patients, in stronger policies based on evidence, and through the further development of knowledge based industries.
• Research capabilities – Australia needs to plan how to provide the facilities that health research needs. We have had a remarkable increase in state-of-art laboratories at Universities and medical research institutes in the last 5 years, which many more nearing completion. We also need to provide our researchers with the next generation of sequencers and imaging equipment, with comprehensive biobanks, with data that is collected as part of our public health system, with access to longer cohort studies, and so much more. NHMRC will work with the new National Research Infrastructure Council on this important matter.

Your feedback and comments are sought and welcome, via nhmrc@nhmrc.gov.au.