Professor Simone Pettigrew, Program Director, Health Promotion and Behaviour Change, at The George Institute has been awarded nearly $800k over three years to develop and apply a world-first system for monitoring the alcohol market.

The award is part of the Government’s National Health and Medical Research Council 2022 Ideas Grant scheme, which supports innovative projects addressing a specific question in any area of health and medical research.

Alcohol use is deeply ingrained in Australian society, accounting for nearly five percent of our total disease burden and causing 6,000 deaths per year.

While there are favourable downward trends, Australians remain heavy drinkers by world standards, consuming 9.5 litres of pure alcohol each per year, and the size and influence of the highly concentrated alcohol industry presents challenges for regulators.

This project will deliver a world-first system for monitoring, analysing, and reporting on the Australian alcohol market. It will generate comprehensive and unique new data to inform evidence-based alcohol policy relating to product composition, on-pack product promotion (including the use of nutrition and marketing claims), and compliance with product labelling requirements.

To deliver this system efficiently and cost-effectively Prof Pettigrew and her team will leverage existing infrastructure developed by The George Institute to monitor the food industry – the FoodSwitch platform.

As well as monitoring and tracking the alcohol market over time, the team will also conduct focus groups and surveys to assess how drinkers respond to different product attributes like ‘low sugar’ or pregnancy warning labels and to what degree they influence purchasing decisions.

Prof Pettigrew said that this work would shed light on the nature of the alcohol market and likely implications for alcohol consumption of marketplace trends and changes in alcohol policy.

“The information generated from our project will optimise the potential for alcohol policy interventions to improve health outcomes and help prevent avoidable deaths, disease, and injury from alcohol use,” she said.

In 2019, world leaders agreed to the most comprehensive and ambitious political declaration on health in history at the inaugural United Nations High-Level Meeting (UN HLM) on Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Yet across the world people are struggling to access high-quality, patient-centric, integrated health services, when and where they need them and without incurring financial hardship. The most recent global monitoring report on UHC re-affirms that we are way off track to achieve 2023 targets.

Ahead of the Multistakeholder Hearing and High-Level Meeting on UHC in 2023, The George Institute urges governments to prioritise the following in pursuit of a healthy future for all:

1. Identify, develop, and formalise opportunities for social participation in UHC, including governance and decision-making roles for communities and civil society across policies, programmes, and resource allocation.
2. Prioritise the routine collection and analysis of data disaggregated by sex, gender, and other intersecting characteristics to track progress towards targets and identify and address barriers that impede women, girls and other groups experiencing marginalisation from accessing health promotion, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care.
3. Put patients at the centre, integrating NCD prevention and care within existing health services to address multiple health conditions, including at primary care level, and prevent catastrophic out-of-pocket costs by putting health insurance programmes in place.

All UHC efforts must be underpinned by core values including a focus on equity and inclusivity, good governance, cross-sector collaboration, support and protection for healthcare workers, and attention to local context, all in a broader framework of human rights and social protection.

Spotlight: Social participation to ensure a healthy future for all

Social participation, sometimes referred to as citizen engagement or community action for health, has become an integral part of health systems strengthening since it was recognised in the Alma Ata declaration on “Health for All” in 1978. Recognition is growing that people’s voices and actions must influence how domestic resources are used to deliver quality health services for all and hold governments accountable. The need to establish platforms and partnerships to enable this was embedded in the Political Declaration of the UN HLM in 2019.

The George Institute is delighted to be involved in the project Social Participation for Health: Engagement, Research, and Empowerment (SPHERE), a partnership with the Civil Society Engagement Mechanism for UHC2030, the World Health Organization, and national partners in countries including Vietnam, Kenya, and Argentina. Over a four-year period, SPHERE will document experiences of advancing social participation for health, collaborate with communities to promote and evaluate context-specific implementation approaches, and draw lessons to advance the broader UHC agenda.

Take Action

1. Follow us on Twitter @GeorgeInstitute, @GeorgeInstUK or @GeorgeInstIN and join us to say #People4UHC #HealthForAll and amplify #UHCDay
2. Join our #UHCDay fire-side chat with researchers and practitioners who – based on their involvement in research, advocacy, and action related to citizen engagement – will share perspectives, learnings, challenges, and the way forward for Social Participation for health (SPH) in their country contexts and deliberate on the role of SPH within the UHC discourse.
3. Learn more about the SPHERE project.

The George Institute for Global Health is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Anushka Patel as its new Chief Executive Officer.

Professor Patel will be replacing Professor Robyn Norton AO and Professor Stephen MacMahon AO, who announced earlier this year they would be stepping down in December 2022 for new leadership and new ideas to continue the growth of the Institute.

Professors Norton and MacMahon co-founded the Institute in Sydney, Australia in 1999 to address the escalating global burden of non-communicable diseases and injury. Today, the Institute is internationally recognised as one of the world’s leading global health research institutes, with over 1,100 people across four regional offices and more than 245 active projects across 50 countries.

“We are delighted to welcome Anushka to lead the Institute during this exciting new phase of organisational growth,” said David Armstrong, the Chair of The George Institute’s Board of Directors. “Anushka brings a wealth of experience and an inspiring vision to the Institute that will ensure it continues to deliver on its mission to improve the health of millions of people worldwide.”

Professor Patel is clinician scientist with a distinguished academic career and extensive senior leadership experience, including most recently as Vice-Principal Director and Chief Scientist at The George Institute. Externally, Professor Patel has held numerous senior academic and professional roles with government agencies, non-government organisations and multilateral organisations, in Australia and globally. Professor Patel is also an active cardiologist in Sydney. She will begin her new role at the end of January 2023.

“It is a great honour to follow in the footsteps of such visionary founders, who have presided over an organisation that has seen extraordinary growth and impact globally,” said Anushka. “We are entering a period of heightened global uncertainty, with rapid social, environmental, economic, technological and geopolitical shifts that will inevitably influence the strategy of any ambitious organisation, particularly one focused on global health.

“This uncertainty also brings opportunities to further grow our impact. I very much look forward to the challenges ahead, building on the strengths of the organisation, our partnerships and our incredibly talented teams across the Institute and George Health.”