ARDR STORY
NHMRC grants: Lucky who works in Victoria
March 2015 - Completing the 2015 round of NHMRC grants, the Australian Government announced $129.4 million in funding, including $108.7 million for 9 NHMRC Program Grants, the second largest NHMRC support scheme.
The analysis of the grants again confirms the concentration of Australia's medical research funding in Victoria.
As is shown in the infographic, Victoria outshines all other states and territories in terms of absolute funding and also relative to its population size.
At the other end of the spectrum, Western Australia and Tasmania received the least funding relative to the size of their population. To put this in perspective, per capita Victoria attracted twice as much NHMRC competitive grant funding as NSW and around four times as much as Western Australia or Tasmania.
The dominant position of Victoria becomes even clearer with non-competitive grants: per capita Victoria received almost four times as much funding ($4.3) as second-placed Queensland ($1.16).
As we have previously pointed out in our story NHMRC Hunger Games, there are several factors that determine the inequity in funding across states and territories, with the most important factor being success rate.
The states can be split into two tiers, with the top tier led by Victoria (19.6% success rate) followed by Queensland (18.2%) and New South Wales (17.2%).
The gap to the bottom tier is significant, which includes South Australia (13,3%), Tasmania (12.4%) and the least efficient state Western Australia (12.2%).
However, South Australia still manages to be competitive with Queensland and New South Wales on a funding per resident basis, which is explained by the much higher rate of applications coming from this state. This also contributes to Victoria's overall dominance: the state outclasses all other states in the number of applications lodged. It is testimony to the sheer size of its medical research capacity, which is also reflected in the large amount of non-competitive funding allocated to this state comprising mostly infrastructure support for independent medical research institutes.
(A previous ARDR article, NHMRC Hunger Games, has raised concern, though, about the overall low success rate of NHMRC grants and the potential social as well as overall economic cost of this lack of efficiency in the system, as well as the apparent strong regional concentration of health research funds in Australia).
Another issue of concern relates to gender, and not much has changed to previous outcome, which the ARDR has illustrated in a previous infographic on the 2014 funding round. In 2015, the success rate of male project leaders was again slightly higher than of females (18% versus 17%), but more importantly, as in previous years far less females than males are project leaders on an application and hence males control almost twice the funding compared to females ($550 million versus $298 million).
