Deadline: 15 May 2017
The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC), with the support of the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, has joined the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases (GACD) with the focus on implementation research in mental health.
The HRC’s first initiative with the GACD is to partner with the Ministry of Health to provide up to $2 million in funding to research better strategies to support Māori and Pacific youth with mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and bipolar affective disorders.
Priority Areas
Proposals must address one of, or a combination of the following items:
- Structural interventions or evidence based policies designed to equitably improve mental health outcomes;
- Early case detection and other secondary or tertiary prevention strategies as well as modalities of treatment, care and access to care which are amenable to scale-up. Prevention, early identification and treatment may include validated pharmacological, psychotherapeutic, psychosocial support and other approaches of relevance to mental disorders such as accessibility to and enhancing compliance with the intervention, also considering cultural context. Wherever relevant, comorbidities and their impacts on prevention and treatment strategies should be taken into account;
- Strategies and approaches to empower and engage patients, formal and informal caregivers in patient treatment and care ;
- Exploring the scale-up of family/community engagement in patient treatment and care.
Expected Impact
- Advance prevention strategies and implementation of mental health interventions, alleviating global burden of mental disorders;
- Establish the contextual effectiveness of mental health intervention(s), including at health systems level;
- Improve tailored prevention and treatment; develop affordable management and treatment modalities for mental disorders and expand access to care;
- Inform health service providers, policy and decision makers on effective scaling up of mental health interventions at local, national and regional levels, including affordability aspects for users and health providers;
- Reduce health inequalities and inequities, including due consideration of gender and age issues where relevant, in the prevention, treatment and care of mental disorders at both local and global levels;
- Maximise the use of existing relevant programmes and platforms (e.g. research, data, and delivery platforms);
- Contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals 3,7 5, 10 and 17, the Global Action Against Dementia and the First World Health Organization (WHO) Ministerial Conference on Dementia,8 the WHO Mental Health Action Plan 2013- 2020.
Funding Information
A total of $2,000,000 is available, which is expected to fund several projects.
Eligibility Criteria
- Multidisciplinary team members have established a high quality track record in related fields of proposed research and pertinent to implementation science and they have the right balance of expertise given goal(s) of the research project;
- Evidence that the research is jointly managed by researchers from high-income countries and LMICs where applicable.
- Early career investigators are part of the team and strong training plan for research capacity-building is included;
- Evidence that stakeholders such as decision-makers and service delivery partners have been actively involved in the research process including the selection and adaptation of the intervention if applicable and the research design;
- Demonstrable engagement with the public and/or patient and community groups or other relevant stakeholder groups.
How to Apply
Interested applicants must register themselves via given website.
For more information, please visit The HRC-GACD Mental Health Research Initiative.