New Strategy Intensifies Sydney Health Partners’ Commitment to Research Translation

The partnership’s five founding members will each take leadership of a strategic platform of health and medical research translation, with the aim of speeding the application of evidence into clinical practice.

SHP Executive Director, Professor Garry Jennings AO, says the new strategy has been developed in consultation with SHP members and recognises that building a better, more sustainable, health system cannot be done in isolation.

“There is a clear and long-term trend towards larger and broader collaborations of researchers to address the great health and medical research challenges of our time,” he said.

“By adopting the new strategy, the members of Sydney Health Partners have reaffirmed that when translating research, the product of their knowledge, skills and resources is greater than the simple sum of the parts.

“SHP is purpose-built to facilitate research collaborations but we are also uniquely positioned to engage everyone in the health services - including management, nursing, imaging, pathology and allied health staff – in addressing the problems that concern them, and which are solvable by research.”

Implementation of the 2019-2022 Strategy will see:

• Northern Sydney Local Health District lead efforts to build medical research capacity and remove barriers to the timely conduct of research
• Sydney Local Health District lead efforts to transform how research improves patient outcomes to meet the needs of our communities
• Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network (at Westmead) lead efforts to utilise digital health and informatics research to optimise models of health care and care delivery
• University of Sydney lead efforts to enhance translational and implementation research expertise within health services
• Western Sydney Local Health District lead efforts to promote collaboration and inclusivity, and by doing so increase research scale and international competitiveness

In leading their strategic platforms, the five founding partners will each work closely with one or two of the nine independent medical research institutes in Sydney Health Partners, as well as individual members of the clinical streams and cross-cutting themes that span the partnership.

The Sydney Health Partners secretariat will support the Partners to implement the strategy by co-ordinating, monitoring, reporting and, in collaboration with the Partners, establishing a framework to evaluate the success of the strategy.

“It is a requirement of National Health and Medical Research Council accreditation as an Advanced Health Research and Translation Centre that we are health service-inspired and led,” said Professor Jennings.

“Since our formation in 2015, SHP has benefited greatly from the very strong commitment and leadership of the Chief Executives and the Boards of our Partners and I welcome their continued support through commitment to the new strategy.

“By working together the Partnership has the resources and jurisdiction required to apply research to achieve health service improvements which might previously have been regarded as too difficult.”