$5million secured for Closing the Gap research
CQUniversity’s Jawun Research Centre has secured $5 million in federal government funding to conduct research that aims to advance work on Closing the Gap (CtG) targets.
Project lead and Jawun researcher Janya McCalman said CQUniversity was one of 110 successful entities to be funded through the Albanese Government’s Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). She will co-lead the project with CQUniversity Project Officer Ruth Fagan.
“Australia's CtG targets represent the social, cultural and environmental determinants of First Nations' health,” Prof McCalman explained.
“The Productivity Commission recently warned that progress to implement the reform commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap has been insufficient and ‘weak’. Australia is failing to meet the CtG targets – of the 15 targets for which national data are available, 11 are improving but only four are currently on track,” she said.
“This funding will allow us to partner with four community coalitions in remote and regional Queensland to co-design, implement and evaluate a collective impact approach to achieve the four reforms underpinning the CtG targets: sharing power, supporting Indigenous data sovereignty, improving partnerships with governments, and enhancing the cultural competence of government strategies. The Yarrabah, Woorabinda, Doomadgee and Cairns community coalitions will prioritise, co-design and share locally-led implementation strategies, and these will then be evaluated to determine impact.”
“We’ll work with, and across community coalitions, to prospectively develop, coordinate and evaluate systems improvements using a common agenda, shared measurements of process and impact, mutually reinforcing activities, and communication and knowledge plans. In doing so, this interdisciplinary research will demonstrate how health policy and intra- and inter-community practice can be transformed.”
Prof McCalman said new knowledge would be translated to inform further community change processes and impacts on the reform areas and CtG targets.
