Submission to improving alignment between the Medical Research Endowment Account and the Medical Research Future Fund

The George Institute for Global Health responded today to the Australian Department of Health’s consultation on improving alignment between the Medical Research Endowment Account (MREA) and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

These two funds provide around $1.5 billion in health and medical research funding each year, and we welcome the opportunity to provide feedback on how to improve the coordination, governance and administration of these two important funds.

We believe that these funds serve important but distinct, purposes and that they should be kept as separate funds and operate under separate legislation. This will help to ensure that there is a balance between investigator-driven, basic research and priority-driven implementation research.

We would like to see initial governance and administrative improvements implemented while the forthcoming National Health and Medical Research Strategy is developed. It’s important that the high-level priorities for health and medical research inform the priorities and streams of each of the funds to ensure a cohesive, fit-for-purpose medical research ecosystem.

We would also like to see improvements in transparency implemented to ensure that processes are open, transparent and clearly communicated.

We look forward to working with the Department further on improving our health and medical research infrastructure.