Team: CI Professor Sarah Larkins, CI Dr David MacLaren, CI Professor Maxine Whittaker, Dr Karen Carlisle and Mr Humpress Harrington.
A fit-for-purpose health workforce, appropriately distributed geographically, networked, and with required skillsets is an essential part of detecting and responding to EIDs. The team will adopt the successful elements of the Structured Operational Research and Training Initiative (SORT-IT) model which have been customised to support advocacy, policy and practice translation. The modified SORT-IT curriculum will be mostly delivered in-country and the curriculum will be delivered by attending workshops.
In each country, meetings are being held with the stakeholders ( ministries and health, development agencies, universities, NGOs, bilaterals and multilaterals such as SPC and WHO) to identify target topic areas in surveillance and response, target participants, processes of identifying participants, and processes of ensuring “release” of participants to participate and undertake research over a 12 month period. Suitable people in-country have been identified to be Mentors.
The select participants (Research Fellows) will be from Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Timor L'Este, and Indonesia. They will undertake implementation research training and complete a workplace linked implementation research project on a surveillance and response question identified in consultations with their manager. Supervision and mentoring will be provided from the project team and from their local in-country mentors. Most of the research will be conducted in the Fellows workplace developing and implementing the research.
Capacity strengthening through research training program activities:
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Year |
Activity details |
|
Year One |
Workshop 1: Infectious diseases, surveillance and response refresher Contextualising implementation research Developing an implementation research proposal |
|
Year One |
Workshop 2: Planning and conducting an implementation research project, ethics submission Planning data analysis and presentations |
|
Year Two |
At home: Undertake research project with support from local and JCU mentor |
|
Year Two |
Workshop 3: Data analysis Disseminating the findings Monitoring and evaluating an implementation research project Writing and publishing |
|
Year Two |
At home: National dissemination and advocacy activities Finalise publications/reports/policy briefs |