Pictured: The Kids Research Institute Australia Executive Director, Professor Jonathan Carapetis AM
As a paediatrician and researcher, I witness on a daily basis the extraordinary benefits of Western Australian health and medical research to individual patients and the community.
Expectant mothers now take folate to ensure their babies are not born with neural tube defects. Spray-on-skin is improving outcomes for burn victims. We can now cure stomach ulcers with antibiotics. And new treatments and therapies are being developed for conditions ranging from stroke to childhood cancer — all because of discoveries made right here in WA.
The flow-on benefits of these discoveries and innovations are enormous — for the economy, the workforce, and the health care system. But until now we haven’t been able to quantify this.
To understand the value medical research brings to our State, the WA Chapter of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes asked Deloitte Access Economics to collect and analyse an enormous amount of data from 21 organisations — medical research institutes, universities, hospital foundations.
Deloitte found that for every dollar invested in WA medical research, via philanthropy, government or other income sources, $2.61 is returned to the national economy.
Impressively, these benefits extend beyond Australia, impacting people all over the world, with the global return estimated at $7.58 for every dollar invested.
The modelling reflects three critical measures of the health impacts of medical research: reduction in burden of disease, avoided costs to the health care system, and reduction in mortality. Whether you live in regional WA or in the city, these outcomes are tangible measures of how medical research improves our quality of life.
But medical research offers much more than improved health outcomes — it is also a critical driver of the WA economy, generating high-quality jobs and economic returns. The analysis found that the sector contributed more than 2600 jobs and $322.9 million to the State economy in 2021 alone, with 91 per cent of that value retained in WA. When you consider that the WA Government contributed $32 million to medical research and innovation in that year, that’s an outstanding return on investment.
The WA Government recognises the strategic importance of the sector, identifying health and medical life sciences as one of eight priority industries for development. This vision is backed by WA’s 10 year health and medical research strategy, and the state’s Future Health Research and Innovation Fund.
This provides us with a strong foundation, but our next steps must be bold. Much more can be achieved with additional investment and a strategic focus on making WA a medical research powerhouse.
We need to retain and build our world class medical research and biotech workforce, ensuring we have among the world’s brightest minds in WA making breakthrough discoveries and developing new drugs and treatments that lead to healthier lives. We need to do better at embedding research as an essential part of our healthcare system, including ensuring that we have electronic medical records in all hospitals, to deliver better outcomes for patients. We must streamline and promote opportunities for commercialisation of our research discoveries right here in WA.
We need to secure a greater share of national competitive research funding. We need to build shared facilities (such as a centralised biobank) and ensure our technological capacity is cutting edge so that all West Australians benefit from advances such as artificial intelligence, big data analysis and the genomics revolution. We must find innovative solutions to ensure our rural, remote and disadvantaged communities receive the best care possible. And we need to ensure that we protect our nation-leading positions in cohort studies, linked data analysis, and involving consumers in every part of the research process.
We must seize these opportunities to grow the impact and reach of our local medical research, as part of the broader push to diversify the WA economy. The timing could not be more urgent. Our prosperity is heavily dependent on the resource sector, which accounts for 46 per cent of the State economy. Medical research is in a unique position to not only build a more diversified economy with high-paying jobs and a highly skilled workforce, but also to offer direct solutions to a range of budget pressures caused by the growing cost of managing chronic disease and an ageing population.
Deloitte’s analysis suggests that because of our medical research sector the state economy will be $2.1 billion larger each year, on average, until 2045. This should give confidence to current and potential investors that backing medical research is one of the best buys for WA.