Improving health and wellbeing through globally significant research and community engagement.
This is the vision of Griffith’s newly restructured Menzies Health Institute Queensland leadership team.
Led by director Professor Sheena Reilly, the institute is now comprised of three overarching programs: Understanding Chronic Conditions; Building Healthy Communities and Optimising Health Outcomes, led by Professors Nigel McMillan, Bonnie Barber and Wendy Moyle respectively.
Positioning Griffith as a leader in world-class health research, Professor Reilly said the strategy is built upon the premise that our future is dependent on research that is firmly embedded in and conducted in partnership with communities that deliver healthcare services.
“Research undertaken at the MenziesHIQ is designed to inform these challenges and will uniquely position the Institute to make the best use of routinely collected healthcare data, conduct globally significant research and drive measureable improvements in health outcomes and wellbeing.”
Professor Reilly said that in developing the newly formed three programs, a thorough scan of the local state and national research environments was undertaken, with each program now comprising a number of groups/teams that facilitate interdisciplinary approaches eg. allied health, biomedical, nursing, and domains eg. clinical, population and laboratory.
Increasingly complex patients
“Health care systems provide care to increasingly complex patients and this requires an interdisciplinary approach. Optimising Health Outcomes will build on evidence-based research and practice through the development and trial of complex interventions while maximising the benefits and minimising harm for groups and organisations,” said Professor Wendy Moyle.
Meanwhile Professor Nigel McMillan, director of Understanding Chronic Conditions said: “Chronic Disease accounts or 90% of all deaths in Australia — the new program will allow us to better study these diseases and integrate our wide range of expertise and world-class research in this area to open up new areas of investigation and develop new patient treatments.”
“There are multiple healthcare challenges in our current systems,” said Professor Bonnie Barber. “Research that identifies the risks associated with poor outcomes is essential and includes developing improved diagnostic techniques/tests and providing better treatment and/or care. A major challenge we face is how to better utilise technological advances to capture and analyse healthcare data more efficiently.”