Rapid response grant recipients announced

These new strategic grants support mid-career researchers affiliated with the Prevention Centre network. The awarded funding will support research to build on or broaden the impact of our projects and address the strategic prevention priority areas nominated by our policy partners. The projects are to be completed within 12 months. 

The Prevention Centre is incredibly proud to continue its support of Australia’s emerging leaders in prevention. The strategic grants follow on from the recently awarded seeding grants for capability building, research translation, and new research grant application development.  

We were overwhelmed with worthy applications for the strategic research grants of up to $100,000 and five have been funded up to about $440,000. We congratulate the successful recipients:

• Public communication about tobacco product regulation
  Lead investigator Dr Emily Brennan.

The project will investigate the extent regulating some attributes in tobacco products (e.g., menthol, filter ventilation) give rise to misperceptions about the harmfulness of unregulated product and how public communication surrounding such regulation might be used to minimise these misperceptions and maximise the number of smokers who quit.

• Co-creating tools to support transformation of the food retail environment
  Lead investigators Dr Tara Boelsen-Robinson and Dr Miranda Blake

The project will test co-created tools supporting retailers, health promotion practitioners, and other stakeholders to improve the healthiness of healthcare food retail environments, at scale, and identify a best-practice co-creation approach for tool development to support healthy food retail implementation.

• Learning health systems approach to optimise implementation of prevention programs
  Lead investigator Associate Professor Serene Yoong

The project will analyse changes over time in barriers to implementation of nutrition and physical activity interventions in childcare centres, and create a living system to facilitate rapid data analysis and co-produce recommendations to address barriers and optimise implementation support.

• Integrating care for physical and mental health
  Lead investigator Dr Caitlin Fehily

The project will develop recommendations to adapt an intervention to build service capacity to provide preventive care to people with a mental health condition.

• Transport Health Assessment Tool (THAT) for Brisbane
  Lead investigator Dr Lucy Gunn

The project will scale up an an existing tool by developing a Transport Health Assessment Tool for Brisbane (THAT-Brisbane) to evaluate the benefits of replacing short car trips with active transport for seven chronic diseases (ischaemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes type II, lung and colon cancers, and breast and uterine cancers in women).