Program overview The Australian health system spends billions of dollars each year treating preventable diet-related chronic diseases - including type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes. These key killers affect millions of Australians and disproportionately affect more vulnerable communities, including those with food insecurity. The Nutrition Science research team is focused on reducing diet-related diseases through implementing innovative research techniques, with a commitment to reaching more vulnerable populations. Together with healthcare partners, The George Institute for Global Health has established ‘Food is Medicine’ programs to provide fresh produce and medically tailored meals to improve the health and wellbeing of Australians experiencing food insecurity and chronic diseases. The team is currently conducting a series of world-class clinical trials to assess their effectiveness, alongside comprehensive program evaluations to inform future scale-up. The N

What is the problem? Malnutrition in all its forms – including nutritional deficiencies – is a leading cause of death and disability globally. Food fortification is a proven and cost-effective intervention to address nutritional deficiencies. Large-scale food fortification (LSFF) is the practice of adding minerals or vitamins to commonly consumed foods i.e., staple foods such as salt, flours, oil, and rice during industrial processing to increase their nutritional value and deliver potential health benefits to populations.  Nutrition labelling has the potential to help achieve public health goals by improving the transparency around food product contents, including the contents of fortified foods. What did we do? The George Institute for Global Health was commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study how nutrition labelling regulations act as a barrier or an enabler to fortification programs in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philipp

Program overview: Our global Health Systems Strengthening for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) program is focused on the conduct of multidisciplinary collaborative research to support countries’ strategic progression towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 3.8: Universal access to high-quality essential health care. Led by Dr Laura Downey, our global team comprises health economists, health policy specialists, epidemiologists, statisticians, and clinician researchers. We have active research and advocacy partnerships with academia, civil society organizations, government departments, health service providers, and multilateral organizations in every continent, where our research predominantly focuses on taking a primary healthcare approach to ensure that everyone can equitably access the essential health services they require without experiencing financial hardship in doing so. The types of research we conduct fall broadly into the following domains: Designing an

Program overview: Health and well-being are intrinsically impacted by socio-determinants related to carers, family, community, and service delivery across health and other sectors, within local country context. Socio-determinants are complex and can include dispossession, institutional racism, drug and alcohol, and debt, resulting in a lack of access to culturally safe services and intergenerational mistrust of services. However, sustainably integrating services within health and other sectors is challenging due to patient, organisational and policy and historical barriers.Our program aims to strengthen health systems resilience using interdisciplinary implementation research across different contexts, cultures and sectors, to holistically address socio-determinants of health so as to improve health equity. Program Objectives:  Examine and implement best practices in community engagement, partnerships and capacity-strengthening.  Embed WHO integrated people-cent

Program overview: System reform is complex, long-term, and involves multiple stakeholders. Traditional evaluation methods, which often focus on short-term outcomes and linear cause-effect relationships, are often not well suited to informing or evaluating system change. The George Institute’s Evaluation and System Reform Program focuses on furthering the role of evaluation in system reform in recognition of the power of evaluative data to contribute to social change - this has implications for what is evaluated and how evaluations are conducted. There is an implicit equity agenda – recognising that systems need to reform to benefit those who need them most. We are concerned with: Conducting ‘mission critical’ evaluations, which in practice means scale, reach and equity Using participatory approaches at all stages, since this increases the potential of evaluation findings being relevant and used Building regular and timely cycles of feedback to imple

Program overview: The health policy analysis group of the Health Systems Science Program seeks to understand and improve how agendas are set, policies are developed, and how these policies can shape - and be shaped by- health systems, societal understanding of health, and its determinants. The group is transdisciplinary in nature, and integrates expertise across health economics, sociology, political science, public health, international relations, modelling and qualitative research to conduct health policy analysis across the spectrum to conduct policy analysis across a range of approaches such as: Outcome oriented approaches: with the intent to identify the 'best' policy solution, through undertaking objective analyses of possible solutions by mapping or quantitatively assessing effectiveness, equity, or feasibility of implementing policies Mainstream approaches: to identify and analyse actors, interactions between them policy process and or to analyse how power and re