Infectious Disease Implementation Research

Collaborating widely, the team are looking at new ways to conduct clinical trials to observe and measure the effectiveness of vaccine programs, explore new prevention strategies through disease modelling and provide real-world results that are immediately applicable.

They use a range of methods to conduct their research, including pragmatic randomised controlled trials, observational comparative effectiveness studies and data linkage studies.

The introduction of rotavirus, whooping cough and pneumococcal vaccines had consequences that were not predicted in clinical trials, demonstrating the importance of ongoing monitoring and surveillance of vaccination strategies. The team is identifying affordable and feasible strategies that can be applied in virtually any community, regardless of their healthcare resources, in order to improve the health of as many children as possible.

Focusing on common and serious childhood infections such as gastroenteritis and respiratory infections, they are looking at new and innovative methods of evaluating treatments by examining their effectiveness in the clinical settings they are intended to be used and working on projects to gauge efficacy of new and existing preventions and treatments in a way that has never been done before in Australia.

The Infectious Disease Implementation Research Team works with clinicians, policy makers, epidemiologists and statisticians to help ensure their research is efficient, sustainable and responsive to clinical and policy needs. They also work in close collaboration with other research groups around Australia, particularly to support many studies that are underway at sites outside of Western Australia.