Our Approach
At the Monash Victorian Heart Institute, we’re turning the traditional clinical research approach on its head. We’re looking into the unmet needs in Cardiovascular disease, creating research teams that cross over the boundaries of medicine into engineering or IT to find solutions, and creating the logical connection between research and education and health care.
Because everything we do is about improving the health of patients, we’re exploring ways of getting the patient perspective into the research agenda, and looking to share that knowledge with the world.
A focus on embedding research and teaching
The Monash Victorian Heart Institute will be recognised globally for excellence in education, training and research.
Education and training will be essential Monash Victorian Heart Institute activities, to train the next generation of cardiovascular health care professionals as highly skilled, future focused and solution seeking. The VHI will be a hub for the training and development of an interdisciplinary cardiac workforce.
Our efforts will build workforce capacity in preparation for the opening of the highly specialised Victorian Heart Hospital and to share our knowledge and experience globally.
In addition to educating and training the health care professionals of the future, we are committed to research training. The Monash Victorian Heart Institute provides a unique clinical research environment to train the future research leaders of our field, through world-class higher research education.
Our whole research agenda is about making measurable improvements to the health of patients, thereby accelerating the research effort of Monash University to become a global leader in cardiovascular research.
At the Monash Victorian Heart Institute, we acknowledge that research and innovation are what is required to deliver meaningful change to the trajectory of cardiovascular disease in Australia. In line with the Monash University commitment to “making change”, excellence in research will be required.
It is here, that we will attract the best and brightest from across the world to Victoria.
Multidisciplinary and partnership-focused
Creating solutions for the future requires thinking beyond current constraints and limits, to explore what is possible when the greatest clinical and research minds meet, in a faculty agnostic approach.
The Monash Victorian Heart Institute will help drive the Monash University cardiovascular health and research agenda alongside other research and clinical partners and will play a key coordinating and connecting role, creating a University-wide, cross-faculty, cardiovascular health network.
The multidisciplinary nature of the Monash Victorian Heart Institute and the interface with the hospital will play a major role in coordinating various fields and their health solutions to maximise their contributions to cardiovascular disease prevention.
This means, collaborative discussions with Monash’s IT and Engineering faculties for research opportunities, as well as partnerships between clinical schools within Monash and other major research organisations such as the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health.
Being part of a community can make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves, which is exactly why the VHI was formed. Building strong and productive relationships within, but importantly, well beyond the traditional health and medical arena brings together the diversity of thinking which will revolutionise cardiovascular care for Australians. And after all, community is the reason we are here in the first place.
Monash Health, Monash University, Alfred Health have been and will continue to be longstanding partners in collaboration, with the VHI bringing together collective strengths of these outstanding network of hospitals and services.
Research can’t exist in a vacuum. Bidirectional, active relationships between patients, researchers, clinicians, industry and Government will be essential to turn ideas into impact, to inform practice and policy, and to create the kind of heart healthcare revolution required to reduce death and disability from cardiovascular disease in Australia.
Key partnerships with research facilitators like Monash Biomedical Imaging, Biobanking Victoria and the Data Futures Institute make further research discovery possible.
Located to accelerate discovery – in a precinct of technology
It’s one thing to have world-class ideas and create innovative solutions to existing problems, but it’s all for nothing if it doesn’t find its way into everyday practise, for everyday Australians.
The Monash Victorian Heart Institute will capitalise on the co-location within clinical settings of the Victorian Heart Hospital and partner hospitals to ensure that:
- clinical need is informing research (bedside to bench);
- that new discovery informs opportunities to innovate in clinical practice (bench to bedside) and
- that we accelerate these solutions to the clinic as quickly and efficiently as possible (bench to bedside and beyond).
And that is just the beginning. The Monash Victorian Heart Institute is a hub within one of the largest and most diverse technology and innovation clusters in the world, the Monash Technology Precinct. This is a thriving biotech and MedTech ecosystem, where multinationals and entrepreneurial start-ups innovate and connect with major players in Victoria’s medical research network like the CSIRO, Monash Health and major national research infrastructure like the Australian Synchrotron and the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication, among many others.
Clinical care, dedicated research infrastructure and innovation expertise and talent make for the ideal environment to accelerate development of new therapies, medical technology and digital health products and services.