STRIDE: Stronger Investments for Infectious Diseases
Until now, the recognition and quantification of the full impacts of infectious diseases (and interventions to address them) has been largely absent from the health policy and funding landscape in Australia. The traditional health economics approach to prioritising investments in infectious diseases typically focusses on the individual health benefits and costs. Failing to account for broader impacts means that funders may undervalue or overvalue infectious disease interventions. STRIDE will use innovative health economics techniques to comprehensively assess the impacts of infectious diseases interventions, helping to align public health spending with the highest value investments for infectious disease control.
STRIDE will be Australia’s first dynamic hub for applied and policy-relevant research on the economics of infectious disease interventions. Experts in economics, transmission modelling, epidemiology, social science, and health policy will work together on innovative research that builds on the infrastructure of 10 large-scale intervention trials to address globally important infectious disease challenge in six key areas: antimicrobial resistance; HIV and bacterial sexually transmitted infections; human papillomavirus; COVID-19; and tuberculosis.
STRIDE will create new knowledge on the true benefits and costs of interventions and work with our stakeholder representatives to transfer this evidence into national, regional, and global policy.
Our four interlinked research domains will create a new investment framework to capture the wider costs and benefits of infectious diseases interventions.
- Population-wide impacts: Models that incorporate population-immunity and population heterogeneity in transmission will be used to fully capture the health impacts.
- Equity impacts: Novel approaches will be used to incorporate the distributional effects of interventions into empirical economic models.
- Community and consumer preferences: Qualitative methods and discrete choice experiments will be used to understand preferences for interventions.
- Economy-wide impacts: Multi-country multi-sector general equilibrium models will be used to assess the macroeconomic impact of potential policies.
Links to results will be posted here as soon as they are available.
Our findings will ensure that public health funding is channelled into effective, equitable and cost-effective infectious diseases interventions, ones which will ultimately save more lives by making the most of available resources. At the end of the 5-year funding period, STRIDE will have established Australia’s place as a global leader in equitable and efficient investments for infectious diseases by changing the way health economic analyses are conducted and ensuring we are better placed to assess interventions for current and emerging infectious disease threats.
- The University of Melbourne
- Monash University
- Australian National University
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- University of Indonesia
- Burnet Institute
- The University of Sydney
National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence.
