'Simpler' new NHMRC structure welcomed

Australia's medical research community has welcomed news of major changes to the nation's sole research funding agency, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Assoc Prof Bronwen Kingwell, president of the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR), said the NHMRC restructure would help to accelerate and translate discovery into better diagnoses, and new treatments.

"It will allow a focus on health research especially relevant to Australia including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, mental health, bird flu, bioterrorism and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health," Kingwell said.

Under the changes, announced last week by federal health and science minister Brendan Nelson, the NHMRC will become a fully independent statutory agency within his department.

The changes also aim to reduce the time-consuming bureaucratic process that confronts applicants for NHMRC grants, and will speed the peer-review process, reducing the time for grant approval to less than six months.

The NHMRC's CEO, Prof Alan Pettigrew, said the benefits would include "simpler and more responsive processes for allocating research funds, improved feedback, and less red tape".

Prof Judith Black, chair of the NHMRC Research Committee, said the council was also working to better align research grants with national health and research priorities "without abandoning the innovations that typically come from fundamental scientific research".

From next year, 'health streams' will be established and organised according to major disease and population groups. Each health stream will have a broad membership of consumers, non-government organisations, policy makers and researchers, who will identify strengths and gaps within their area of responsibility and recommend strategies for ensuring there are adequate human resources, facilities and funding for "emerging and future challenges".

The health streams will investigate the needs of particular populations, the biomedical and basic research required to make advances, the benefits that could be achieved through clinical, health services and policy research, and the potential use of informatics and genetics.

Each stream will also explore the opportunities for industry involvement in research, and research commercialisation.

Research balance

ASMR's Kingwell said it was "vital" that the new, targeted approach to research funding be balanced with the fundamental biomedical research that underpins advances in all health areas.

She noted that the NHMRC budget was currently below the OECD average of 0.2 per cent of gross domestic product, and called on the federal government to commit to further health research investment, as outlined in its own Investment Review of Health and Medical Research, known colloquially as the Grant Review.

"The proposed NHMRC restructure is the first step in an exciting vision which will deliver better health research outcomes to the community," Kingwell said. "A further investment by the federal government in the 2006 budget would secure the deal."

In the online version of the Medical Journal of Australia, editor Dr Martin Van Der Weyden said that, five years into the 21st century, the scope and function of the NHMRC had remained unchanged since it became a statutory body in 1992, with a research budget of nearly $400 million.

Van Der Weyden said questions were being raised about whether the NHMRC could meet the challenges of delivering its mission in the new century. "There is a view that the time has come for the NHMRC to modernise and mirror itself on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, the Canadian Institute of Health Research, and other organisations such as the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom," he said. "The attributes these organisations share include a high public and political profile, dynamic leadership, effective and accountable governance, strategies to achieve clearly defined goals, and a cadre of health and research professionals who communicate consistently and widely with other research and health organisations, universities, and the private sector. "In contrast, the mould and modus operandi of the NHMRC have remained largely unchanged over the past 30 years."

He said a radical option was for the NHMRC to shed all its functions, except health and medical research, the model for the NIH, the Canadian Institute of Health Research, and the UK's Medical Research Council. "But the Australian research psyche shuns the revolutionary in favour of incremental change," Van Der Weyden wrote. But, he said, all discourse on modernising the NHMRC was "academic" in the absence of a commitment by the Australian government to provide the agency with appropriate research funding to for the NHMRC, with built-in annual growth.

"After all, who would want to lead an enterprise that, by world standards, is static or falling behind?" he asked.