Overview

There is an unqualified need to strengthen PHC services in very remote communities in NT for the following reasons:

• The pressing need for high quality, effective and efficient services to meet high population health needs;
• A strongly expressed appetite of services and government to evaluate current and future programs to achieve this end;
• Cost savings that result from increased access to PHC services;
• Acknowledged underfunding of Health Services Research (HSR) through NHMRC;
• More recently available funding through MRFF that focuses on research translation; and
• Potential transferability of research findings to other remote areas nationally and internationally.

At the same time, rapidly emerging research utilising linked administrative datasets across sectors is providing new insights into the social and economic drivers of health outcomes. Health and other social services need to continue to develop, implement and monitor the effectiveness of workforce initiatives, service models and systems of governance appropriate to context in a sustainable fashion.

Arguably the country’s leading multi-institutional remote and rural health services research team is implementing a number of studies that build on a substantial body of work in order to collectively describe and analyse efforts to generate new knowledge and, critically, translate the results into real world amelioration of suffering across remote NT.