Rural, regional and remote communities face unique health challenges, including limited access to health care, workforce shortages, and higher disease burden. Consumer and community involvement is essential for addressing real-world health needs and fostering equity, yet its role in shaping research priorities remains largely underexplored, particularly in rural contexts. This study aims to identify consumer priorities for rural health research in Australia and to describe the process and learnings of a novel approach to promoting involvement of rural consumers in health research.
Citation: Catapan SC, Nasir BF, Alexander T, Bell A, Maxwell J, Jenkinson B, MacAskill W, Taylor J, Christoffersen A, Gavioli L, Smith AC, Russell T. Consumer-driven approach to determining health research priorities: what matters most to people living in rural Australia? Rural and Remote Health 2026; 26: 9949. https://doi.org/10.22605/RRH9949
Research capacity building in healthcare works to generate and apply new knowledge to improve health outcomes; it creates new career pathways, improves staff satisfaction, retention and organisational performance. While there are examples of investment and research activity in rural Australia, overall, rural research remains under-reported, undervalued and under-represented in the evidence base. This is particularly so in primary care settings. This lack of contextual knowledge generation and translation perpetuates rural–metropolitan health outcome disparities. Through greater attention to and investment in building research capacity and capability in our regional, rural and remote health services, these issues may be partially addressed. It is proposed that it is time for Australia to systematically invest in rurally focussed, sustainable, embedded research capacity building.
Aust J Prim Health (2019) 25 (2): 104–107.
https://doi.org/10.1071/PY18201
The Victorian Teletrial Collaborative – a partnership between the Regional Trials Network-Victoria, AlfredHealth TrialHub, VCCC Alliance, and Safer Care Victoria – has developed a consistent approach to delivering teletrials across Victoria, informing national and international efforts to address equity of access to clinical trials.
The original three organisations joined forces in 2022 under a collective impact model, with Safer Care Victoria joining in 2024, for the greater benefit of priority populations including rural and regional patients, outer metropolitan patients, older Australians, First Nations peoples and those with less common cancers. The group delegated roles and responsibilities by organisation to enhance the collective impact, efficiency, and timeliness of teletrials in Victoria.
The joint publication, Implementing Teletrials to Improve Equity of Access for Regional Patients With Cancer: Report From the Victorian Teletrial Collaborative, has now been published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The Vetting in Health Research – Inclusion Framework (VeHRIF) is a newly developed tool designed to assess the inclusivity of capacity building resources for health researchers. It was created in response to the lack of existing frameworks that could appropriately evaluate a wide range of research tools and resources for their relevance, accessibility, impact and engagement with community. Developed collaboratively by the Health Research for All (HRFA) team and partners, VeHRIF provides a structured and scalable approach to vetting resources using four inclusive research principles: Evidence-based, Relevant and Accessible, Engagement with Community, and Impact on Practice.
VeHRIF is intended for use by both researchers and consumers to ensure that resources featured on the HRFA hub meet standards of inclusivity and support better practices in research. Its flexible design allows it to be applied across various research types and diversity domains, and its Likert scale-based assessment enables nuanced evaluation. The tool will continue to evolve through user feedback and testing, with future adaptations planned to facilitate the assessment of resources that are not fully accessible or require context-specific criteria.
Highlights
• Clinical Quality Registries describe the appropriateness and effectiveness of delivered care
• We identified significant unwarranted clinical variation in Victorian lung cancer quality indicators
• We observed rapid translation of best evidence-based practice molecular investigation to clinical care
• The Victorian Lung Cancer Registry observed significant improvement in clinical documentation and MDM presentation
• Address to psycho-social distress screening remains a challenging objective
