It’s not sexy, but research into the way our health system treats patients could be just the tonic the sector needs.
A year ago this month, the McKeon Review into Health and Medical Research outlined how we can get better bang for the bucks – up to $4.8 billion – Australian governments spend on health research each year. We don’t have to spend more to get more value, at least not in the short to medium term. What we do have to do is better direct and leverage investments already underway.
The McKeon Review calls for embedding research into the health system. This makes sense. Health is a massive industry that already accounts for 9.5 per cent of GDP. It should have an R&D arm to help plot future direction.
So what needs to change to make this happen? We have to integrate research into health delivery. Australia is comparatively light on in terms of health services researchers and health economists. In the last round of National Health and Medical Research (NHMRC) grants only around 4 percent of grants went to health services research. And yet it is exactly this kind of research that will be vital to ensuring our system will continually improve without becoming unaffordable.
Now no-one makes racy television programs about health services research. We are not talking about curing cancer here and it won’t deliver the breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not vitally important.
The Australian Clinical Trials Alliance has been collating examples of high impact, non-commercial clinical trials that have led to improvements and savings in anaesthesia, intensive care management, and nephrology (dialysis/kidney failure) to name a but a few. These clinical trials are great examples of research into the way things get done in health, research that can provide benefits for patients as well as containing and even reducing costs.
On the ageing front, researchers in Victoria have shown people with cognitive impairment are much more likely to have secondary complications when in hospital, such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections, than their unimpaired counterparts. Yet few if any hospitals check for cognitive impairment on admission and adjust treatment accordingly, or provide training to their staff in how to manage cognitively impaired patients. There is some big scope for improvement in this one area alone, especially when one factors in the expected growth in dementia associated with an ageing population.
Nursing and primary care can also benefit from research. Recent research from Griffith University Queensland showed catheters can be safely kept in a patient’s arm for longer than what is currently standard practice. This could translate to huge savings in nursing time and therefore costs.
So how can a country which finds itself in an increasingly tight fiscal environment drive more research like this that can result in both cost savings and improved patient care?
The main source of funds for medical research is the National Health and Medical Research Council. The McKeon review recommends between 10 to 15 per cent of the NHMRC budget be allocated to priority areas for ‘top-down strategic research’. That still leaves plenty of scope for investigator-led activity while sharply increasing the likelihood of research that will boost efficiencies.
A national strategic plan for health and medical research would help ensure our health system delivers value for money.
As a former health minister, Prime Minister Tony Abbott knows the stakes are high.
The Prime Minister should seize this opportunity to do for the Australian health system what Paul Keating did for superannuation, and consequently the financial services industry. Let’s hope he does just that through a continued but recalibrated investment to research in this year’s Federal Budget.
Elizabeth Foley is Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director at Research Australia.
By Elizabeth Foley
Source: Financial Review