Our research
  1. Macquarie University
  2. Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences
  3. Departments and schools
  4. Australian Institute of Health Innovation
  5. Our research centres
  6. Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science
  7. Our research
Centre Director
Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite The CHRIS team is led by Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite View all CHRIS research outputs

Transforming healthcare systems

Research within the Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science (CHRIS) guides policy into practice and provides deeper insights into the big picture of healthcare delivery.

Through our research and related projects, we focus on developing:

  • clinician-led approaches to organising, managing and evaluating care across the full spectrum of healthcare
  • the research skills of early career health system researchers
  • an international research reputation of knowledge and expertise on health organisation management and healthcare quality
  • education and training activities in support of governance and a resilient, sustainable health system.

Read more about our core research streams below.

Complex systems and implementation science

Healthcare is increasingly recognised as a complex adaptive system. It is comprised of multiple levels of interacting agents, including diverse:

  • organisations (eg hospitals, not-for-profits, governments, professional bodies)
  • groups (eg medical teams, online patient communities)
  • individuals (eg doctors, nurses, patients, carers, pharmacists).

All of this interconnection leads to nonlinearity, making understanding, influencing and improving the healthcare system a challenge of the greatest magnitude.

Stream leader: Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite 

Co-leads
Team members

Health and societal outcomes

Improving estimates of the burden of injury and disease is integral for priority-setting and evaluating the impact of preventive strategies. Examining health outcomes following the provision of healthcare can also be instrumental in guiding where improvements need to be made in health service delivery and health policy.

The health outcomes stream is conducting large-scale, population-based studies in the areas of:

  • paediatric health outcomes and academic performance
  • intergenerational impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)
  • long-term effects of injury or disease
  • older adults and care transitions.

We are also conducting a case-control study of adult injury and health service use.

Stream leader: Professor Rebecca Mitchell

Team members

Health system sustainability

Globally, healthcare systems face numerous challenges that test their ability to provide safe, high quality care. These challenges encompass:

  • ageing populations
  • rising prevalence of chronic and complex diseases
  • escalating cost pressures due to advancements in medical technologies and medications
  • spending on low-value care
  • inefficiencies resulting from system fragmentation
  • limited utilisation of data and evidence to drive reform.

This research stream endeavours to investigate these and other challenges to ensure the sustainability of health systems. We provide research evidence and strive to formulate and assess a range of practical interventions that align with clinical, patient and economic perspectives.

Stream leader: Professor Yvonne Zurynski

Team members

Human factors and resilience

While the rate of medical error remains stubbornly high, at around 10 percent in modern hospital systems, there are considerable untapped opportunities to improve care by turning our attention to what healthcare systems do well.

Instead of focusing on why systems sometimes fail, resilience science engineering seeks to understand how dynamic and highly complex organisations and systems, like healthcare, usually get things right. Human factors applies evidence-based methods and knowledge about people to design and improve the interaction between people, systems, and organisations.

Our research uses a human factors and co-design approach to developing healthcare systems so that they are fit for purpose and better meet the needs of the patients and clinicians who use them. In addition to meeting user needs, well designed systems are efficient, effective and more resilient.

Stream leader: Professor Robyn Clay-Williams

Team members

International healthcare reform

Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite brings his international reputation for health services and systems research to uniquely focus on comparative international health reform efforts.

He has published widely on health policy, management and systems reform and co-edits two book series in this field, on the topics of:

  • international efforts to understand resilient healthcare
  • the reform activities of 152 different countries.

The books, used to inform future policy direction, assess a range of countries’ efforts to make systems improvements.

Stream leader: Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite

Learning health systems

Healthcare produces a lot of data. Bringing all this timely and relevant information together is the goal of our learning health systems (LHS) research stream.

The aim is to integrate data, clinical information, test results, genomics profiles and patient histories with patient-reported outcomes, preferences and experiences, placing these diverse datasets at the disposal of key healthcare decision makers – patients, clinicians, and policymakers, for example.

Stream leader: Professor Jeffrey Braithwaite

Team members
  • Associate Professor Louise Ellis
  • Professor Yvonne Zurynski

Patient safety and appropriateness of care

When a patient is harmed when receiving healthcare, health services undertake an investigation or review to find out what happened, and why, and to prevent a similar adverse event occurring again. We conduct research into finding out both why adverse events occur and how the investigations can be optimised to prevent future adverse events.

Appropriate care is  delivered in line with recommendations from clinical practice guidelines. We study whether patients are receiving appropriate care at a population level, which enables us to identify areas for improvement and to recommend effective and practical interventions to optimise care for all Australians.

Our work provides the evidence base to reduce healthcare costs and improve care by supporting clinicians to deliver the right care at the right time to the right patients.

Stream leader: Professor Peter Hibbert

Team members