Barwon Health and Deakin University collaborate to drive innovation in healthcare, research and education. By combining Deakin’s research excellence and cutting-edge education with Barwon Health’s clinical and healthcare expertise, the partnership delivers lasting benefits for the Geelong community and beyond.
Together, they address some of the biggest health challenges – building workforce capacity, improving patient care and translating research into real-world outcomes.
Since 2019, the collaboration has delivered over 100 impactful research projects, focusing on better patient outcomes, advanced care delivery and meaningful health solutions that benefit people at all stages of life.
As Victoria’s largest regional integrated healthcare provider, Barwon Health addresses the health needs of individuals at all stages of life through a comprehensive range of services. These services include outpatient care, emergency, acute medicine, surgery, mental health, primary care, community services, aged care and sub-acute care and rehabilitation across 21 sites.
Clinician researchers with conjoint Deakin and Barwon Health appointments have led the development of the research partnership over the past ten years, supported by a great number of quality researchers at Deakin.
Since Deakin’s School of Medicine launched over a decade ago, its partnership with Barwon Health has flourished. The partnership aims to drive workforce development, recruitment and retention of key staff, better patient health outcomes, including shortened hospital stays, reduced mortality and optimised staff and cost efficiencies.
Throughout our years of collaboration, this partnership has led to significant advances in health and wellbeing. From quality audits to patient experience surveys and a randomised controlled clinical trial, research is being translated directly to improved care at the hospital bedside.
Our partnership with Deakin is crucial. It enables us to assemble the fit-for-purpose interdisciplinary teams essential to tackle the challenges facing our health system. Together, we can work across the stages of life, from pregnancy to aged care, to create and translate new knowledge.
Professor Peter Vuillermin
Director of Research, Barwon Health
For Barwon Health, partnering with Deakin was an obvious choice, given Deakin’s location, status as Victoria’s only non-metropolitan-based medical school and reputation as a leading research institute.
But Deakin brings so much more to the partnership. As a relatively young university, Deakin is dynamic and innovative, with excellent capacity in areas that are important to the modern research environment, including artificial intelligence, health economics, systems theory and health transformation.
The partnership leverages Deakin’s research excellence and innovative education with Barwon Health’s clinical expertise. Over the next decade, the collaboration aims to deliver internationally-recognised contributions to discovery, evaluation and implementation science, with measurable impacts on public health.
The partnership is also supporting the next generation of clinician researchers through the Barwon Health and Deakin University Clinician Scientist Pathway. This program will invest $1.34M over four years to fund 10 clinician PhDs across medicine, nursing and allied health. The pathway provides four-year appointments, supporting clinicians to balance research with clinical roles while building their research track record and advancing their career prospects.
Together, Barwon Health and Deakin University collaborate on innovative projects that deliver real-world benefits to the community. From early childhood health studies to national mental health initiatives, these projects highlight the meaningful outcomes of our partnership.
The Barwon Infant Study is an internationally recognised birth cohort study led by Barwon Health, Deakin University and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Following over 1,000 Geelong mothers and their children, it has built a world-leading early life ‘biobank’ of more than 500,000 biological samples to uncover the origins of disease and health.
MAGNET, Australia’s leading mental health clinical trial network, is a partnership between Barwon Health and Deakin University, supported by a $12 million MRFF grant. Focused on adult mental health, MAGNET provides a national platform for large-scale clinical trials, driving evidence-based treatments and better patient care.
The partnership’s collaborative projects are funded by various sources, including the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), Australian Research Council (ARC) and philanthropic funding bodies. These diverse funding sources have enabled groundbreaking research and innovative projects that directly benefit the community.
