Canberra has been urged to adopt a “consistent approach” in covering the indirect costs of medical research, under a strategy which would also align the administration of the two main funders.
A new decadal strategy for Australian health and medical research recommends systemic funding to pay for overheads like laboratories, libraries, power and technicians, which are estimated to cost institutions 63 cents for every dollar they receive in medical research grants.
Strategy author Rosemary Huxtable said the government should use a consistent method to support indirect costs across the two major federal funding providers, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF). This should start with an “initial uplift” for MRFF-funded grants, she said.
The government has partly accepted the recommendation. Health minister Mark Butler announced an extra A$128 million (A$68 million) over four years to cover MRIs’ “admin costs” associated with MRFF grants.
This will address an “imbalance” in funding for research overheads, Butler said. MRIs are not eligible for the Research Support Programme, which helps cover universities’ indirect research costs, and while the NHMRC contributes to their infrastructure costs, they get “effectively nothing” for MRFF-related overheads.
