Burnet’s Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies (HMHB) study in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been nominated by global development social enterprise platform, Devex, as one of a handful of Australian projects that’s set to innovate the future of health care markets.

HMHB was singled out as “an initiative on the cutting edge of change” for linking patient care with research and data collection to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of programming.

Burnet’s Head of the Centre for Biomedical Research and Principal for Maternal and Child Health, Professor James Beeson told Devex that research and evidence-based policy is much needed in development health care.

“We, at our institute, have the philosophy that you don’t do health care without research — the two need to go hand in hand,” Professor Beeson said. “It is something we and others in Australia have been pushing for.”

HMHB was established to address PNG’s unacceptably high rate of maternal and child mortality. In PNG, 5000 newborns die each year and a woman in PNG is 80 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in Australia.

In collaboration with local partners, HMHB aims to identify, test and ultimately demonstrate better ways to deliver appropriate healthcare to rural and disadvantaged areas of the country.

“The idea of getting evidence from research for policy and development in PNG is a test case for how we can strengthen the ties between research and the health authorities,” Professor Beeson said.

“We really want to link the research to development assistance by providing evidence on how and where it can best be spent.”

Find out more about Burnet’s Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies project and click here to read the Devex report on the five Australian projects poised to redefine development health care.