Professor Glenn Salkeld, head of the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, recently wrote this overview of the Nutbeam review, in which he urged colleagues to “get active” and comment on the report.
Cris Kerr, an advocate for the value of patient testimony, took his advice and has sent in the following response to the report, calling for increased transparency in the allocation of public health funding (is anyone at the NHMRC reading…?)
Cris writes:
“I read the Nutbeam report, and I support it.
I have one primary concern, and it’s related to lack of transparency when identifying public health research priorities and awarding public health
research dollars.
I understand the report makes recommendations only, and hence, doesn’t go into detail regarding the framework in which those recommendations could be implemented.
It would have been nice, however; to see a set of recommendations around some ethical principles that could underpin a transparent hierarchical
structure – one that would support the identification and weighting of public health research priorities in a transparent way.
There were some references within the report that indicated this had been considered, but it was not fleshed out.
Strengths and weaknesses of the current National Funding approach to Public Health were discussed, yet one obvious solution, linking to an ehealth data system to facilitate priorities, was not.
An ehealth system that includes patient testimony could contribute to a ‘major national data linkage project’.
In this way it could provide a wealth of real-time data – in support of a transparent hierarchical structure for identifying, weighting, and
ultimately funding public health research priorities – for public health researchers and for the NHMRC.”
If anyone else would like to comment on the Nutbeam Review, please don’t hesitate to drop Croakey a line.
