PHRN - Participants

Who Is Involved ?

Paper people

The Population Health Research Network is an Australian Government initiative established as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS)

The Network embodies a group of collaborators working together to further develop Australia's health data linkage capabilities. This collaboration is a significant accomplishment that has the potential to enhance Australia's standing as a global data linkage leader.

In addition to the key funding from the Australian Government, additional financial and in-kind support has come from every state and territory in Australia either via state governments, key universities or major research institutes.

A significant and historic national Funding Agreement was signed in early 2009 between the Australian Government's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and the University of Western Australia (UWA), the PHRN collaboration's Lead Agent.

As part of that funding agreement the PHRN Program Office was established in Perth, Western Australia and continues to operate as the administrative hub and client support base for the PHRN. Hosted by the world renowned Telethon Institute for Child Health Research the Program Office plays a key role in coordinating the development of the national data linkage infrastructure.

In addition, the PHRN has also established the Centre for Data Linkage (CDL) at Curtin University in Western Australia. The CDL is responsible for developing and managing a secure data linkage facility to allow national linking of approved state/territory government and other research datasets or collections.

Whilst the PHRN collaboration is a new force in data linkage, other significant data linkage capabilities have been in place in Western Australia since the mid 1990's (via the Data Linkage Branch (DLB) of the Department of Health WA) and in New South Wales since 2006 (via the Cancer Institute NSW's Centre for Health Record Linkage (CHeReL)

The aim of the PHRN has been to establish collaborators and/or data linkage units in every Australian state or territory to achieve the aim of creating the nation's first truly national data linkage network. Building on the success of the existing data linkage units in WA and NSW, the PHRN has established a further four data linkage units in South Australia/Northern Territory, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland.

In addition to the Data Linkage Unit's, a comprehensive group of PHRN Project Participants has also been established. These particpants are signatory to the PHRN Funding Agreement and are responsible for the co-development of the PHRN in conjunction with the Program Office, the governing Management Council, the Lead Agent UWA and DIISR.

One of these Project Participants, The Sax Institute, is developing the Secure Unified Research Environment (SURE) facility that will allow researchers to remotely access and analyse approved data extracts provided by data custodians for their research project. The Sax Institute is also developing a national Data Delivery System (DDS) to provide mechanisms for secure transfer of data between the PHRN Centre for Data Linkage, state linkage units, custodians and researchers.

In 2011 additional funding was also allocated to the PHRN from the Australian Government's Education Investment Fund Super Science Initiative (EIFSSI), which saw the network expand even further.

Following is a list of PHRN Project Participants and operating Data Linkage Units. Further information and links to each can be found on the PHRN Project Participants page and the Data Linkage Units page.

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