What are the Translation Centres doing and why?

[Video begins with music playing with text on screen 'About NHMRC accredited Translation Centres']

[Text updates to NHMRC accredits leading centres of collaboration in Australia that excel in providing research based health care and training. Advanced Health Research and Translation Centres. Centres for Innovation in Regional Health. These centre work together as the Australian Health Research Alliance']

Professor Steve Wesselingh, Australian Health Research Alliance 00:18
AHRA, the Australian Health Research Alliance, is all 9 centres, and actually, that's given us an opportunity to learn from each other and sort of nationalise activities.

Being able to share problems, share challenges, and then share solutions has been exceptional.

00:35
The goal of the Translation centres is very much to embed research in health, so understanding that Australia does magnificent discovery research, but often our research doesn't change the health outcomes for individuals and particularly for individual health consumers.

00:53
And by embedding research in health, and that means bringing together universities, hospitals, primary healthcare, Aboriginal health agencies, medical research institutes, all into the same organisation, we think that we can do that a lot better.

Professor Garry Jenning, Sydney Health Partners 01:11
If you take a problem like, say, obesity, which everyone's worried about at the moment. Sure, it's a medical problem. It leads to lots of complications, but it's also a social problem, a cultural problem, a problem to do with food supply, a policy problem.

01:26
And you've gotta bring those teams together and that's what Advanced Health Research Translations centres are capable of doing.

01:31
They can go shopping around the health services for the problems they're facing. They can go shopping around the academic centres for people that have got the skills and expertise to deal with that problem, and they can bring them all together.

01:44
And actually, focusing on the problems opposed to the research itself, so we've got an opportunity to really help define best practise at a granular level.

01:53
You know, what's working for this community at this time and in this place.

Professor Helena Teede, Monash Health Partners 01:58
The whole motivation here has to be to get over our individual silos and political agendas into the community of practise and say ultimately, we want to deliver better healthcare.

02:08
Better healthcare, sustainable healthcare, patient-centred or community-centred healthcare. And everyone will win.

Professor Sue Walker AO, Melbourne Academic Centre for Health 02:17
The advantage of these centres is that we will be able to find answers more quickly. We'll be able to more nimbly feed them back to our health services. We'll be able to more accurately inform the education and thereby we'll be able to improve patient care the most quickly.

Professor Christine Jorm, NSW Regional Health Partners 02:34
The NHMRC accreditation is incredibly important. It gives everybody working with us a sense that they're contributing to a major national initiative.

Professor Christopher Levi, Sphere 02:43
Advanced Health Research Translations centres and centres for innovation
in regional health are Australia's first at-scale, purpose-built vehicles for supporting translation of research and driving research translation to impact and better outcomes for patients.

Professor Sue Walker AO 03:03
To me the Australian public now has a place to come in this community of practice. They have a voice and increasingly will have a voice. Every Australian, the community being both the funder and beneficiary of research, and the funder and
beneficiary of healthcare, has the right to expect us to work together to deliver better health impact.

Professor Steve Wesselingh 03:22
I think speed is the big thing. So traditionally, it takes about 17 years for sort of an idea or a discovery to move into the health system. So, we do something in breast cancer, seventeen years later, someone with breast cancer actually benefits from that. But if you bring together the researchers, the academics, the universities, the medical research institutes, along with the hospitals, along with primary healthcare, you can move that innovation into healthcare delivery much faster, which means the healthcare consumer will benefit from that a lot earlier.

[End of transcript]

[Video begins with music playing with text on screen 'Improving clinical trials, health services and clinical practice']

[Text on screen 'The Centres are working to provide a more powerful base for clinical trials, health services and clinical practice to benefit patients in Australia.']

Professor Christopher Levi 00:10
One of the really central vehicles to both knowledge generation and research translation is the vehicle of the clinical trial.

Clinical research requires all the disciplines to come together to conceive the question. Making sure the question's relevant, so that brings the clinicians and the consumers in.

Then, you need the academic expertise to design, get the methods right. The analysis right, get the execution right. And then, you really, you need the healthcare system to support that execution, recruitment, performance of the trial.

The clinical trials is a really complex space. And there are multiple players. Federal, state, hospitals, uni's, and the advanced centres and centres for innovational health. They're there to try and bring the sectors together. Cause we know that bringing together the intellectual capital's a really powerful thing. If we can bring together all the minds and focus around some of the key challenges.

Professor Gary Geelhoed 01:17
There is a wonderful sense of collaboration and cooperation around the centres.

For me, it's a great thing that I'm virtually in daily contact with all these different, you know, people sharing ideas and so on.

I'm passionate about research because I think it's not just the results that you get. You're bringing in the latest from all around the world in your field and applying it much, much faster. And so, that has implications for better healthcare, but also better, you know, workforce and the two go together.

Ideally, you'd like virtually every patient that came into a hospital to get the chance to go into some sort of trial.

Ms Areti Gavrilidis 01:48
So for the first time, we're actually bringing people around the table that are supporting the endeavours of research and ethical approval processes.

So, the benefit is to the patients because project studies commence earlier. There's benefits to the researchers themselves because the process are much easier. Anything that we can do collaboratively creates efficiencies and potential returns really for our population as a whole.

Professor Dave Story 02:20
The collaboration across the AHRTC's is incredibly important. I come from a national and international clinical trials network within anaesthesia.

We have had major success. And part of that success is to be able to have 50 hospitals across Australia doing trials to get thousands of patients funded, largely by the NHMRC.

We are a big country. We have a broad range of populations. From the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney through to our indigenous Australians in very remote Australia.

If we have much greater confidence that our results apply to all those people, we can have much greater certainty in taking up those approaches.

The main thing about health research is to try and reduce the uncertainty. There's a lot of things
we do in clinical practice where we don't have a strong evidence base to make our choices,
particularly for individual, and particularly for high risk patients.

The sort of research that we are now doing particularity comparative effective research, looking at things that we routinely do in practice, but to try to work out whether one is better than the other.

So, if we can say to government and medical leadership generally, 'We have something that's very effective, and its cost effective, and we think it applies to all Australians', that is the perfect research answer.

[Text on screen: 'Thank you to:

• Melbourne Academic Centre for Health
• Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre
• Health Translation SA
• Sydney Health Partners
• Brisbane Dimantina Health Partners
• SPHERE Maridulu Budyari Gumal
• Western Australian Health Translation Network
• Central Australian Academic Health Science Network
• NSW Regional Health Partners.']

End of transcript.

[Video begins with music playing with text on screen 'The importance of involving end-users in designing research']

Professor Helena Teede 00:04
So in Australia, we've had a real paradigm shift, really powering potential change, which is that the NHMRC have decided that our translation research centres, advanced health research translation centres, and centres for innovation in regional health, their role is to make sure that research is for the betterment of their patient population.

When you have consumers in the room or community or patients, there's a level of accountability to listen to and relate to the personal story and realise the problem they're really there for, which is actually not about more money for my research or less patients in my hospital beds. It's actually about, okay, we may need to do that, but ultimately we're really about improving the quality of life for this child, this family, this particular group of people who are struggling with a problem.

Professor Dave Story 00:52
End users implies a lot of people. I think most importantly, it is our patients and consumers. And the sort of questions we should be asking and working with consumers and patients on is what outcomes are important to them.

Similarly, we need to ask, but also workforce welfare. We don't want to introduce things that make the lives of the healthcare professionals impossible, because it is too complex.

Professor Garry Jennings AO 01:17
If you involve the consumers in research, firstly, they're helping to find the problem in terms of what their needs are.

Secondly, they can assist in terms of making sure that the research is conducted efficiently and effectively.

Perhaps most important of all, you start looking for outcomes that are meaningful for them, not necessarily make a very fine publication, but actually improve people's lives.

The challenges in involving the end user are many. Firstly, we need a very substantial cultural change. It's a move away from top-down research to co-creation, with much more bottom-up involvement. Secondly, I think we need to look at how we evaluate outcomes.

Is it just whether people live or die with a new breakthrough treatment for cancer or heart disease, or is it they have better lives, that there are other measures that you might be able to use.

Rebecca Loveidge 02:13
I think it's very important that people are involved in driving the changes that we're making in the research that we're looking into, because as somebody with diabetes, I want my day-to-day life to be easier.

I guess it's important that in 50 years, I don't lose my eyesight or something like that but I've gotta get through that 50 years first.

You need to have the input of both sides to have research that's really valuable because there's no point fixing a problem that doesn't really exist.

Professor Elif Ekinci 02:39
I think the unique aspect of being a clinician researcher is that a lot of the time I spend talking to people and working out what they liked about particular treatments or therapies or particular investigations.

We can have a really great frank discussion about what's working, what's not working. It's very important to have the end user involved in the research and the research design.

For any of our projects going forward, we're increasingly doing that. To have their perspective from the start, from the outset, will allow us to design something which is more likely to be of benefit for the end users.

Professor Helena Teede 03:14
So in my mind, in a community of practice, everyone's an end user. The policy makers are an end user. They should be using evidence to inform their policy. The community's ultimately the end user. The Clinicians are the end user if they're not using evidence-based practice. State government jurisdictions are end users. Private insurance and private hospitals are end users. It's about how we all work together and work out how every end user ends up better off because we'll listen to and work with each other and that's what these centres are about.

[Text on screen: 'Thank you to:

Melbourne Academic Centre for Health
Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre
Health Translation SA
Sydney Health Partners
Brisbane Dimantina Health Partners
SPHERE Maridulu Budyari Gumal
Western Australian Health Translation Network
Central Australian Academic Health Science Network
NSW Regional Health Partners.']

End of transcript.

[Video begins with music playing with text on screen 'Improving health outcomes for vulnerable groups'.]

Professor Steve Wesselingh 00:05
One of the things that I worry a lot about in terms of medical research is that we're inventing fabulous things but only a subset of society gets access to it. And in some ways, we're increasing inequity or inequality with new technology and with medical research.

So what we have to make sure is that the progress that we make works in all communities and when you have established a particular model of care or a particular drug or device, that that is available to everyone.

Professor Elif Ekinci 00:41
The people from vulnerable groups, including minority groups and indigenous people, do suffer from diabetes
and it's complications.

And it really is a major concern for people living in the communities to be able to really translate the benefits that we see in clinical practice in the tertiary setting or in big cities with the new therapies that are available including new medications and new technologies to be able to really bring that into rural and remote settings and allow people to have access to these new changes and therapies is what drives me.

An important aspect of the work that we do is really building relationships with communities and building trust over time so really we'll look at it as a long term relationship with the communities.

Professor Steve Wesselingh 01:26
By bringing together people who understand health services, people who understand the delivery of healthcare, along with the aboriginal community and then along with the aboriginal health services, we have been able to write plans for the delivery of healthcare in aboriginal communities for cancer, for diabetes, for heart
disease, and for stroke.

So solving those sorts of problems can have a dramatic impact on a community that currently dies from chronic disease 20 years earlier than the rest of the country.

Professor Christine Jorm 02:01
Being a centre of innovation in regional health is incredibly exciting. We know that the health outcomes of Australians in rural, regional remote areas are much worse than the people in cities. They live on average four years less, which is a lot of life. They have higher incidences of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and stroke.

So because of Australia's unique, large geography and small population, there is a real need for centres that can reach out beyond our cities.

Professor Sue Walker AO 02:36
The collaboration really gives us an opportunity to hear from the health services and to hear from patients
what they most need.

This obviously involves very often, vulnerable populations. For example, a clinical trial that we're starting is focusing on the increasing number of overweight and obese women in pregnancy and we know that they have an increased risk of adverse outcome.

By being able to target clinical trials, but also gathering data about those groups across our sites, it will be able to quickly inform health services, how to deliver care better to such vulnerable groups.

So the research programs that we're looking at are trying to tackle the big morbidities, of obstetrics whether it's preterm birth, fetal growth restriction, still birth and preeclampsia.

And we see the collaboration as a really integral part of how we can engage health services with research institutes to find the answers to the big questions that pregnant women and newborns need to know.

Professor Christine Jorm 03:39
The case of end-of-life is a really good example where it's crucial to hear from the communities and understand what's important to them.

For where you have very different views within aged care. From the residents, from the staff, and the families about what should happen.

Professor Gary Jennings AO 03:54
If you take the elderly population, some of the work we've done out in West Sydney, many of them are on multiple medications given to them by different people. Some of those medications might interact with each other.

There's this useful project we're doing in actually, reducing the amount of medications that older people in residential care are taking.

If you don't engage to the consumer, if you don't go to where they are, particularly disadvantaged
and vulnerable groups, then you may not see them at all and you may not be able to deal with the problem.

[Text on screen: 'Thank you to:

Melbourne Academic Centre for Health
Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre
Health Translation SA
Sydney Health Partners
Brisbane Dimantina Health Partners
SPHERE Maridulu Budyari Gumal
Western Australian Health Translation Network
Central Australian Academic Health Science Network
NSW Regional Health Partners.']

End of transcript.