Australia’s top research funding body has presented one of its highest awards to Bond University researcher Professor Tammy Hoffmann OAM.
The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) honoured Professor Hoffmann with the 2024 NHMRC Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award for Leadership in Health Services Research.
The award recognises Professor Hoffmann as the highest-ranked female applicant for an Investigator Grant (Leadership) in the Health Services Research pillar for 2024.
The $2.9 million grant will support her work in empowering patients to take a more active role in their medical decisions, consider the benefit-harm balance of treatment options, and address the issue of reducing low-value care.
"Much health and medical research is conducted with the ultimate goal of improving people’s health and wellbeing, yet it is well-known that getting research to routinely inform clinical practice is challenging," Professor Hoffmann said.
"Over the years, my research interests expanded to also address how to help clinicians and patients work together to make the best decisions about care and investigating issues that occur at the point of evidence creation so that the research evidence can actually be used to guide decision-making.
"I am honoured to receive this award and hope that it shines a light on the fundamental importance of generating and implementing high-quality, patient-centred, and usable research evidence."
The NHMRC award is named in honour of the Australian Nobel Laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn AC, a molecular biologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 jointly with Professor Jack Szostak and Professor Carol Greider.
Professor Hoffmann leads the Centre for Evidence-Informed Health Decisions in the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University.
Her research spans evidence-based practice, shared decision making, evidence implementation, and improving the value, transparency and reporting of research.
"Early in my career, I became really interested in understanding why there’s often a gap between research findings and how they’re used in clinical practice. This led me to focus on finding ways to break down those barriers," Professor Hoffmann said.
"This grant will help us to keep working on how to foster decision-making that is based on the best available evidence, while ensuring care is centred around what’s best for each patient."