The SALHN Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director Research Strategy are delighted to release SALHN’s Innovation and Research Strategy 2025-2027 (PDF 12.4MB).
The Southern Adelaide Local Health Network (SALHN) is a unique health service, providing complex care, from the beginning to the end of life, to southern Adelaide and rural communities.
We aim to deliver the best healthcare and outcomes for both the Southern Adelaide and the wider community. The SALHN Innovation and Research strategy will cultivate a workplace where our staff can enquire, investigate and deliver care that is continuously improving.
The purpose of the SALHN Innovation and Research Strategy is to build an environment of innovation and research that:
- Puts consumers and people with lived experience at the core
- Continually improves its capacity and culture
- Provides engagement opportunities for all our staff
- Embeds enabling infrastructure to grow our capability
- Develops and consolidates partnerships.
A feature of our strategy is the Four Fields of Enquiry, which encapsulates both our research and improvement culture, while capturing opportunities for further development.
Innovation and Research Strategy 2025-2027.The Four Fields of Enquiry (FFOE) will drive a culture of questioning and capability building in research and continuous improvement at SALHN.
Discovery science
Goal: To allow improved understanding of the scientific basis of disease and approaches to therapy.
Description: Discovery science makes strong contributions to the research culture and sense of enquiry that underpin associations of research with improved health care performance. It uses an incremental approach where observations and hypotheses are tested with the aim of improved biomedical understanding as the basis to improved health care.
Clinical trials
Goal: To develop evidence-based treatments.
Description: Encompasses a series of clinical trial designs in which standard care is compared with an alternative treatment. This is an essential step in building evidence-based care. The outcomes for the standard care group are usually superior to non-trial outcomes, with safety of the intervention based on prior research and data safety monitoring process.
Health services research
Goal: To use clinical and demographic data to improve delivery and safety of health care, and to reduce inequities.
Description: Uses a predominantly observational approach with clinical and demographic data to analyse large cohorts during routine care. This facilitates understanding and exploration of hypotheses in action that can then assist delivery of improved and safer care and the identification of situations where care delivery is uneven.
Continuous improvement / implementation science
See: Continuous Improvement / Implementation Science
Goal: Achieve optimal delivery of health care.
Description: Involves the implementation of a structured approach and the expertise of frontline people to identify areas for optimisation, intervention and implementation. This includes the delivery of evidence-based healthcare interventions often derived from research and enquiry.
This will result in:
- more effective and efficient care for our patients
- improved teamwork, and staff wellbeing through better engagement with our colleagues, teams and the wider organisation
- strengthened connections with our key partners
Every person in SALHN knows where they are and where they want to be in the Four Fields of Enquiry, strengthening research culture and improving care.
We will:
- work together with the Divisions to identify strengths and opportunities within the Four Fields of Enquiry
- benchmark our current capability and capacity across the Four Fields of Enquiry
- support all staff to improve, to question, to innovate across the Four Fields of Enquiry