Most health research in Australia is funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), which distributes around $800 million each year through competitive grant schemes. An additional $650 million a year is funded via the Medical Research Future Fund, but this focuses more on big-picture “missions” than researcher-initiated projects.
Ten years ago, around 20% of applications for NHMRC funding were successful. Now, only about 10–15% are approved.
Over the same ten-year period, NHMRC funding has stayed flat while prices and population have increased. In inflation-adjusted and per capita terms, the NHMRC funding available has fallen by 30%.
As growing numbers of researchers compete for dwindling real NHMRC funding, research risks becoming “a high-status gig economy”. To fix it, we need to spend more on research – and we need to spend it smarter.
More funding
To keep pace with other countries, and to keep health research a viable career, Australia first of all needs to increase the total amount of research funding.
Between 2008 and 2010, Australia matched the average among OECD countries of investing 2.2% of GDP in research and development. More recently, Australia’s spending has fallen to 1.8%, while the OECD average has risen to 2.7%.
When as few as one in ten applications is funded, there is a big element of chance in who succeeds.
Think of it like this: applications are ranked in order from best to worst, and then funded in order from the top down. If a successful application’s ranking is within say five percentage points of the funding cut-off, it might well have missed out if the assessment process were run again – because the process is always somewhat subjective and will never produce exactly the same results twice.
So 5% of the applications are “lucky” to get funding. When only 10% of applications get funding, that means half of the successful ones were lucky. But if there is more money to go around and 20% of applicants are funded, the lucky 5% are only a quarter of the successful applicants.
This is a simplistic explanation, but you can see that the lower the percentage of grants funded, the more of a lottery it becomes.
This increasing element of “luck” is demoralising for the research workforce of Australia, leading to depletion of academics and brain drain.
The ‘application-centric’ model
As well as increasing total funding, we need to look at how the NHMRC allocates these precious funds.
In the past five years, the NHMRC has moved to a system called “application-centric” funding. Five (or so) reviewers are selected for each grant and asked to independently score applications.
There are usually no panels for discussion and scoring of applications – which is what used to happen.
The advantages of application-centric assessment include (hopefully) getting the best experts on a particular grant to assess it, and a less logistically challenging task for the NHMRC (convening panels is hard work and time-consuming).
@ceo_nhmrc https://t.co/L8vUoEeHbV
— NHMRC (@nhmrc) December 15, 2020
However, application-centric assessment has disadvantages.