How Can Research Have Greater Beneficial Impact in Rural Australia?

To exponentially amplify the impact of health research in regional, rural, remote, and very remote (RRRvR) communities for improved health outcomes and reduced health inequities.

RRRvR health inequities are severe, enduring, and largely impervious to our best efforts to address them. It is unjust that, simply because of where they live, some people do not have the health they need to live the life they want. Although research has been one of our greatest inventions for solving problems, it has had little impact on the problems with which RRRvR communities grapple. Improving the beneficial impact of RRRvR research was the focus of a recent Research Australia University Roundtable.

As someone with an abiding interest in research methodologies and the research process more generally, I read widely on research matters, am research active, review research funding applications, and train others in research processes. This commentary is a synthesis of my insights from the Roundtable as well as the published literature, including my own published work.

For people in RRRvR communities to reap the benefits that research has the potential to offer, far more substantive changes are required than adjusting assessment criteria or funding streams. It is the context within which research is conceived and conducted that must be reimagined. Without changing the context, other alterations are likely to be ineffective. When research becomes a genuine partnership between researchers and RRRvR communities to answer locally prioritised problems, we might finally achieve the impact that is required.