Setting and meeting priorities in Indigenous health research in Australia and its application in the Cooperative Researc
- PDF / 216,427 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 610 x 792 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 139 Views
BioMed Central
Open Access
Review
Setting and meeting priorities in Indigenous health research in Australia and its application in the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health Johanna M Monk*, Kevin G Rowley and Ian PS Anderson Address: Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit, Centre for Health and Society, Melbourne School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia Email: Johanna M Monk* - [email protected]; Kevin G Rowley - [email protected]; Ian PS Anderson - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 20 November 2009 Health Research Policy and Systems 2009, 7:25
doi:10.1186/1478-4505-7-25
Received: 22 December 2008 Accepted: 20 November 2009
This article is available from: http://www.health-policy-systems.com/content/7/1/25 © 2009 Monk et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Priority setting is about making decisions. Key issues faced during priority setting processes include identifying who makes these decisions, who sets the criteria, and who benefits. The paper reviews the literature and history around priority setting in research, particularly in Aboriginal health research. We explore these issues through a case study of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health (CRCAH)'s experience in setting and meeting priorities. Historically, researchers have made decisions about what research gets done. Pressures of growing competition for research funds and an increased public interest in research have led to demands that appropriate consultation with stakeholders is conducted and that research is of benefit to the wider society. Within Australian Aboriginal communities, these demands extend to Aboriginal control of research to ensure that Aboriginal priorities are met. In response to these demands, research priorities are usually agreed in consultation with stakeholders at an institutional level and researchers are asked to develop relevant proposals at a project level. The CRCAH's experience in funding rounds was that scientific merit was given more weight than stakeholders' priorities and did not necessarily result in research that met these priorities. After reviewing these processes in 2004, the CRCAH identified a new facilitated development approach. In this revised approach, the setting of institutional priorities is integrated with the development of projects in a way that ensures the research reflects stakeholder priorities. This process puts emphasis on identifying projects that reflect priorities prior to developing the quality of the research, rather than assessing the relevance to priorities and quality concurrently. Part of the CRCAH approach is the employment of Program Managers who ensure that stakeholder priorities are met in the development of resear
Data Loading...
