If you'd like to undertake a rural placement, partner with us, or learn more about our initiatives and research, we'd love to hear from you.
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Health system sustainability
Our research shapes policy, strengthens rural health services and builds capacity for lasting impact in regional communities.
How our research shapes health system sustainability
At Deakin Rural Health, we lead research that makes a difference. Our work is nationally recognised and directly informs government policy, shaping practice to improve health outcomes in rural and regional communities. We work with partners to help improve rural health services and sustain lasting change.
The ability to innovate and adapt is critical to the development of high-quality health services in rural Australia. Rural health services are often required to develop strategies to respond to entrenched workforce shortages, dispersed and heterogeneous catchment populations, frequently in a context of policies, programs and models of care designed for metropolitan regions. As a result, services need to be creative and adaptive to meet the needs of their communities.
At Deakin Rural Health, we understand the unique challenges rural health services face and work with them to innovate and adapt, building more sustainable health systems for the communities they serve.
Our research areas
Our research seeks to support health services and health systems to foster innovative organisational cultures; develop and implement consumer-centred models of care for rural settings; and ensure the sustainability of health programs and the patient benefits they bring.
Implementation and impact
We use our unique expertise in place-based research to support the implementation, sustainability and scalability of evidence-based practices in rural and regional health services. Our work improves access to care, service delivery, health outcomes and organisational performance, particularly in low-resource settings. We also provide national and international leadership in sustaining, scaling and spreading of health service innovations.
Embedded research
Rural embedded researchers play a unique role in building capacity and driving impact, for health services. We work to integrate and sustain embedded researcher positions and programs, and to optimise the impact of their work. This approach strengthens local capacity and plays a key role in driving our research forward.
Mental health and wellbeing
Supporting people with mental health presents a challenge for rural communities due to a range of factors including an understrength mental health workforce, and healthcare access issues for consumers. Our research seeks to support health service innovation and reform, generating an evidence base for rural and regional service models, and by supporting increased capacity in the mental health workforce.
Transform healthcare systems for all people
When you study a research degree at Deakin, you’ll work in the field tackling real health challenges facing communities today. Work alongside leading researchers and contribute to projects that shape policy and improve care.
How our research is influencing practice and policy
Our researchers work alongside a diverse range of clinicians and other health service staff every day, providing essential research capacity and expertise necessary to support innovation and real practice change.
The focus of our work is diverse, with examples of supported practice innovation including:
- regional access to colonoscopy services - Grampians Integrated Cancer Service
- organisation-wide monitoring and evaluation capacity building - Brophy Family and Youth Services
- improving staff wellbeing in health services - Colac Area Health
- preventing unnecessary emergency department visits in at-risk populations - Grampians Health
- improving meal-time experiences of aged care residents - Grampians Health/Colac Area Health.
Previous work has supported policy development and has been cited by a range of policy reports and guidelines including the National Health and Medical Research Strategy 2026-2036 (Draft, Australian Government), the Being Equally Well policy roadmap to support improved physical health for people with serious mental illness (Mitchell Institute, 2022), World Report on the Health of Refugees and Migrants (WHO, 2022) and Collaborative Care and Place-based Planning Approaches Report (Sax Institute, 2025).
Building capacity for more sustainable health systems
Our research seeks to support health service innovation and reform that leads to more sustainable health systems. Some of the ways we support sustainability include:
- Strengthen workforce capacity for innovation and reform by developing research capacity-building initiatives and embedded researcher models within rural health services, and disseminating these innovations.
- Undertaking research with a view towards informing scalability and sustainability needs, and understanding how to tailor healthcare to meet the needs of different rural contexts.
- Generating and disseminating research evidence to underpin system-wide policy documents and guidelines, and decision-making.
