$8 million in funding to boost Australia’s preventive health strategies

Professor Luke Wolfenden has secured nearly $8 million in NHMRC funding to help curb the prevalence of chronic disease in our communities.

His latest funding win - a $2.9 million NHMRC Investigator Grant - will help improve the way nutrition and exercise prevention strategies are designed and implemented in community settings such as schools, childcare centres, sporting clubs and workplaces.

This work will be carried out alongside a five-year, $5 million NHMRC Synergy Grant awarded in October last year that will take 20 years of learnings developed in the Hunter region and apply them at a national level to reduce the prevalence of chronic disease.

Professor Wolfenden is the lead investigator on both projects and sees the collective effort a way to overcome the 15 to 17-year lag it takes for health systems to adopt and successfully implement proven chronic disease interventions.

“Interventions capable of preventing half of all cancers and 80 percent of heart disease have already been developed yet there is a critical lack of evidence to guide implementation,” he explained.

“This means billions of dollars are spent worldwide on disease prevention programs, but there is little evidence to guide strategies to ensure they’re implemented effectively.”

The $2.9 million project will kick off in 2026 and will set up a national system to monitor and assess prevention programs continuously. Evidence of a program’s effectiveness will also be generated through the system. It marks the fourth back-to-back NHMRC research fellowship for Professor Wolfenden - an impressive feat given the highly competitive nature of the national fellowship schemes.

The $5 million dollar project will complement that work and involves collaborators from 10 research institutions, including the University of Sydney, Deakin University, Monash University, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the University of British Columbia, the University of Oxford, the University of Florida, Washington University (in St Louis Missouri) and the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

The collaboration will draw on a two-decade strong working model developed in the Hunter New England region called The Learning Health System. It brings researchers and health organisations together to achieve rapid learning, by undertaking research with and within health organisations as part of their ‘usual business’.

The home-grown approach could help health services dramatically reduce the cost of getting evidence-based programs implemented in local communities.

“We want to get the most effective interventions adopted as quickly as possible, and we want to make sure the prevention system is working in a coordinated, efficient way to help that occur,” Professor Wolfenden said.

“Both projects are all about optimising prevention measures, with the Investigator Grant focused on the best way to carry out these measures and the Synergy Grant focused on synergising efforts in community settings across Australia,” Professor Wolfenden explained.

Professor Wolfenden is a behavioural scientist with the University of Newcastle and the Hunter New England Local Health District and is a member of the Hunter Medical Research Institute’s Population Health Research Program.

HMRI is a partnership between the University of Newcastle, Hunter New England Health and the community.