The RETAINR team at MUDRIH, from left, Adrienne Forsyth (Research Project Assistant), Dr Margaret Stebbing (Team Leader), Marillyn Harkness (Project Administrator).

Adrienne Forsyth has joined the Retention of Allied Health Professionals at Retirement Age in Rural Victoria (RETAINR) study team at MUDRIH as Research Project Assistant.

Adrienne holds degrees in Human Nutrition and Exercise Physiology and is in the writing up stage of a PhD thesis.

The RETAINR research and action study aims to identify important beliefs and attitudes of those who decide to continue to work as an allied health professional beyond retirement age.

Allied Health Professionals aged 55 years or more, who are retired or about to retire, who live in rural Victoria or intend relocating from the city to a rural area in retirement, are all invited to participate in this study.

Further information email adrienne.forsyth@monash.edu or see the RETAINR recruiting website.

An invitation is extended to all education, clinical, research staff and students to take part in the Journal Club for the School of Rural Health, which will next meet on Wednesday 10 October from noon to 1pm.

The next article for discussion is: ‘Researcher-decision-maker partnerships in health services research: Practical challenges, guiding principles.’

Anne Hofmeyer, Cathie Scott and Laura Lagendyk

BMC Health Services Research 2012, 12:280 doi:10.1186/1472-6963-12-280

Background information and questions for discussion are as follows.

Health researchers are under increasing pressure to ensure decision makers, such as health service managers, practitioners and policy makers, are represented in research teams to assist with effective translation of research findings into practice. This can give rise to practical challenges.

This paper identifies the involvement of organisational “insiders” as a particular issue for health services research. Based on the authors’ experience, some guiding principles are presented for dealing with the ethical concerns arising from such partnerships.

Questions for discussion include:

• Are the guiding principles presented useful? Adequate? Realistic?

• The paper focuses on the challenges associated with members of the research team being identified in qualitative interview transcripts as participants in the case. Do similar ethical challenges arise when working closely with health services using other research methods e.g. audit and feedback, observation of practice, consumer interviews? If so, what guiding principles could we suggest to guide researchers?

• Do you think working in a regional/rural context poses any additional challenges, or confers any advantages, compared to more populated settings when managing the risks associated with decision maker involvement in research?

Hopefully the paper will encourage people to consider how they approach research partnerships, so participants are encouraged to bring their own experiences of working with decision makers/health services to the discussion.

The facilitator is Penny Buykx and those interested can join by:

• attending Meeting Room 3 (Level 2), School of Rural Health, 26 Mercy St Bendigo or
• by videoconference (IP 130.194.213.113) or
• teleconference (9903 5988) from other sites.

Lisa Lavey from the Office of Research presented a poster at the Australasian Research Management Society’s (ARMS) Annual National Conference on the Gold Coast recently.

Lisa attended the conference, which had the theme ‘Ride the Wave of Collaboration: Industry, Institutions, Individuals,’ with Cathy Ward from the Office of Research and Michelle Moon from Bendigo Regional Clinical School.

Lisa’s poster was entitled:  ‘Collaborative research projects across Universities: developing guidelines to support research partnerships.’

The abstract explanation was: “Universities are promoting research collaboration as part of their overall research strategies, while at the same time centralising core services to all departments, schools and faculties. An effect of centralisation is that research collaborations and partnerships are made increasingly difficult.”

Project stages of development outlined the processes involved in collaborative partnerships, the problems and recommendations for improvement. It was the 14^th annual conference of the Society.

The Office of Research has enjoyed visits by two visiting academics, Professor Stephen Campbell, Professor of Primary Care Research with the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and Associate Professor Mike Jones from the Macquarie University.

Mike and Stephen have been working with staff of the Office of Research on various research projects, and will complete their work on 5 October and 12 October respectively.

The Director of Research, Leigh Kinsman and Stephen will visit Alice Springs to meet with Centre of Research Excellence collaborators from Flinders University, Alice Springs.

Stephen Campbell

Mike Jones

At a recent SRH Education Forum held in Bendigo, Judi Walker and Laura Major lead a discussion on the school’s involvement with the FRAME – Medical Schools Outcomes Database (MSOD) Survey and longitudinal tracking project, as well as strategies which will be implemented to increase student survey returns.

The FRAME survey is sent to students following their longest stint in a rural clinical schools and forms part of the MSOD and Longitudinal Tracking project, the world’s first nationally coordinated project for tracking medical students through medical school and into prevocational and vocational training.

The MSOD Project is a collaboration of a number of key stakeholder organisations representing students, postgraduate education and training, rural and Indigenous health, and workforce planning.

MSOD Project objectives include:

• Provision of an effective, reliable evaluation mechanism for assessing long-term outcomes of educational programs, in particular those aimed at increasing the recruitment and retention of a rural medical workforce.
• Provision of a secure, reliable source of accurate, up-to-date data for the purposes of long-term medical workforce planning.
• Determining the effectiveness of targeted programs and interventions in influencing the career decisions of medical students.
• Promotion of strategic reform of medical education policy and programs at the university, state and Commonwealth levels in order to match program and policy frameworks with national health priorities.
• Provision of an information resource for research projects for Australian medical educators that will contribute to the national and international literature on medical education.

The school’s active involvement with the project will ensure that it continues to meet all RCTS funding parameters, in particular Parameter 8 – Maintaining and progressing an evidence base.

The administration of the student survey across the school will coincide with scheduled end of semester Year 3B and 4C feedback sessions across all four regional clinical schools, to ensure all relevant students complete the survey.  This new way of administering the survey will ensure that Monash’s 2012 survey return rate will be an improvement on previous years.

For more information on the MSOD project and some more interesting facts, have a look at p26 of the August edition of Partyline magazine, published by the National Rural Health Alliance.

You can “like” the MSOD Facebook page which will keep you up-to-date with all things MSOD. You can also visit the Medical Deans website for up-to-date information

–        By Laura Major, Manager, Rural Education Program (OHoS)

Professor Stephen Campbell

Professor Stephen Campbell, Professor of Primary Care Research with the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, will present a workshop for members of the research team in Bendigo titled ‘Grants, Papers, Targets and Research Planning’.

The workshop will be held on Tuesday, 9 October, from 2pm to 4pm in Tutorial Room 5, Mercy St Building, Bendigo.

Please register early by contacting Cathy Ward by Friday 5 October by email cathy.ward@monash.edu

Stephen is Professor of Primary Care Research at the University of Manchester, UK. He has more than 150 publications generating in excess of 5000 citations. His research focuses on the quality and safety of general practice and primary care.

He is also a Postgraduate Research Tutor for Primary Care and the Institute of Population Health at the University of Manchester, and teaches Primary Care in the University of Manchester.

As well, Stephen is Principal Investigator on the £6,300,000 NIHR Greater Manchester Primary Care Patient Safety Translational Research Centre.

The Australian Journal of Rural Health is publishing a special edition – Psychology in the bush: Innovative use of psychological principles in rural and remote communities – and is calling for papers.

The goal of this special edition is to examine the use of psychological principles in regional, rural and remote communities and identify creative strategies and program approaches that identify and meet the needs of these communities.

Download full details.

Associate Professor David Perkins (left) chaired the forum, while Professor John Wakerman from the Centre of Remote Health in Alice Springs, also spoke.

The Centre of Research Excellence in Rural and Remote Primary Health Care (CRE) held a forum in July, titled ‘The CRE: Findings, Challenges and Future Directions’ to explore how its activities can inform current and future challenges in the provision of rural primary health care services.

More than 40 interested people from across Australia, including staff from La Trobe University and Monash University, heard an excellent overview of the Centre’s activities and the implications for Rural Health.

The CRE is a collaboration between Monash University School of Rural Health, the Centre for Remote Health, a joint centre of Flinders University and Charles Darwin University in Alice Springs, and the University of Sydney’s Department of Rural Health in Broken Hill.

The aims of the CRE are to better understand primary health care service utilisation and needs in rural and remote Australia; to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework; and to recommend models for primary health care in rural and remote Australia.