Deadline: 1-Aug-25
The National Medical Research Council is seeking proposals for its Population Health Research Grant Program: Open Category to develop an integrated ecosystem that anchors preventive health efforts in primary care and care in the community with good system linkages to support citizens at different life stages, novel strategies and approaches will be needed to drive sustained behavioural modifications for individuals to adopt healthier behaviour and habits.
Population Health is the health of a population as measured by health status indicators and as influenced by social, economic and physical environments, personal health practices, individual capacity and coping skills, human biology, early childhood development, and health services.
Themes
- Mental Health: This theme will fund research catering to the spectrum of patients with mental health conditions, from children and adolescents in schools, to working adults, to elderly patients.
- Care for Mothers and Children: This theme spans the continuum of care from pre-conception, pregnancy and childbirth to infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and research should address metabolic health, mental health and cognitive development of children and their mothers.
- Population Mobilisation and Improved Access in the War on Diabetes and Other Common Chronic Diseases: To address these issues, proposals for research submitted under this theme can cover new models of care, strategies, and research pertaining to patient behaviour and education, as well as to create change and societal shifts in enabling access to healthcare for patients with diabetes or other common chronic diseases.
- Effective Use of Technology to Improve Health: This theme will fund research that seeks to identify and create innovative models of care in the areas of telehealth and telemedicine, including for health promotion and preventive health, systems integration and databases, and privacy protection and data security.
- Prevention and Preparedness for Healthy Ageing: This theme seeks to fund research into ideas that can extend healthy and functional lifespan and reduce the impact of disability, with a view for translation or application of solutions that can have a positive impact on their seniors.
- Care for Complex Patients: Research submitted under this theme should address the needs of this patient population, including healthcare access, self-management, and care coordination. This theme will also support research targeted towards allied health and multi-disciplinary team-based care pertaining to the delivery of integrated care, including both medical and non-medical professionals.
- Sustainable and Efficient Care Delivery: This theme addresses the need to improve the sustainability and efficiency of the healthcare delivery system through improving resourcing and allocation, and approaches such as Value-Based Care.
- Palliative Care: As the population ages, palliative care will become increasingly important as they seek to enable patients to live out their final days in a dignified manner. Over the years, Singapore has been enhancing the quality, affordability and accessibility of palliative care services.
- Traditional and Complementary Medicine (T&CM): This theme will fund research that seeks to understand the prevalence, attitudes and health seeking behaviour of the population with regard to T&CM, with a focus on how Western medicine and T&CM can be used safely together.
- Health Systems Research: Besides improving various care models serving different groups of patients, research at a health systems-level could potentially yield important insights into system-level interventions or policies that may impact health on a wider or deeper scale.
- Rehabilitation (Rehab): HSR will encourage cross-collaboration between the acute, primary and community care providers to develop novel ways of improving rehabilitation care across the care continuum including Interprofessional Care, Extended and Expanded Care provision, Rehab Outcomes Research, Pre-Habilitation in the Healthier SG construct, Early Supported Discharge, Return to Employment, Technology leverages and Telerehabilitation.
Areas of Research
- This would include new Precision Health models that shift away from broad-based interventions to interventions that are tailored to maximise impact on high-risk groups (e.g., by combining clinical/phenotypic data, genetic data, behavioural data, digital data). To achieve this, the Population Health Research Grant (PHRG) will fund research proposals that seek to improve health outcomes through a population health approach under the following research areas:
- Health Promotion and Preventive Health: This area encompasses research devoted to the building of the scientific and economic evidence base for health promotion and disease prevention in the Singapore context. This includes applied etiological or determinant research, field or community-based research, and cost-effectiveness/analysis research that are collaborative, interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary, problem-solving, and solution-oriented, and translatable to practice for implementation.
- Health Services Research: Health Services Research (HSR) is the multidisciplinary field of scientific investigation that studies how social factors, financing systems, organisational structures and processes, health technologies, and personal behaviours affect access to healthcare, the quality and cost of healthcare, and ultimately our health and well-being. Its research domains are individuals, families, organisations, institutions, communities, and populations.
Funding Information
- Up to $1.95M (inclusive of up to 30% indirect costs) for up to 3 years. Projects involving prospective patient/subject recruitment may apply for up to 5 years.
Eligibility Criteria
- Each PHRG application must fall within the scope of the research areas as articulated above, and be led by a PI fulfilling the eligibility criteria. Only one Principal Investigator (PI) is allowed per application. The number of applications by an individual (as PI) is capped at 1 grant application per grant type in a grant call.
- PI must have a PhD and/or MBBS/BDS/PharmD/MD and/or other appropriate Postgraduate Qualification (at least a Masters Degree) in areas relevant to the proposed research. For proposals involving patients, either the PI or co-I should be SMC-registered; or should be able to demonstrate ability to access patients through SMC-registered collaborators. It is recognized that some studies may be pre-clinical and not require the PI to be SMC registered.
- Additional eligibility criteria includes:
- Hold a primary appointment in a local publicly funded institution and salaried by the institution.
- Be an independent PI with a demonstrated track record of research as evidenced by the award of nationally competitive funding (international funding to be considered on a case-by-case basis) or substantial publication record.
- Have a laboratory or clinical research program that carries out research in Singapore.
- Hold a minimum of 9 months employment with a local Singapore institution. Upon award, the PI must agree to fulfill at least 6 months of residency in Singapore for each calendar year over the duration of the grant award.
- No outstanding reports from previous BMRC, NMRC grants and other national grants.
Evaluation Criteria
- Selection of successful proposals would be based on the following evaluation criteria:
- High quality scientific research
- Proposed research topic should be population health research of importance to the health system in Singapore. Provided they are scientifically meritorious, proposals which address the set themes would be given priority consideration.
- Demonstrate the potential to improve health outcomes and be adopted into actual policy or practice within 2-3 years upon study completion.
For more information, visit NMRC.
