About
The Healthy Housing CRE is a 5-year project funded by the NHMRC from 2020-2025. It involves over 20 researchers from across Australia and the world.
A quarter of Australia’s disease burden is comprised of cardiovascular disease, COPD, anxiety, depression, asthma, falls and injury. All such health issues have been at least partly attributed to housing. While other high-income countries have actively and successfully used housing to reduce their burden of disease, Australian policy and research has failed to bridge disciplinary silos.
Furthermore, housing interventions in Australia have only inadvertently improved health, missing the opportunity for evidenced based housing improvement for efficient health gain. Across the disciplinary boundaries, this innovative Centre of Research Excellence brings together the leaders capable of addressing these issues. It will be the first and only health-focussed Centre internationally to span healthy housing for Indigenous Australians, people in need and the growing population of rental housing tenants.
Through the collaboration and connections encapsulated in the Centre, this 5-year project will deliver new knowledge through three interconnected research streams that focus on housing over the life course, quantifying the health gains of housing focused interventions and measuring and responding to the complexity of exposure to housing.
The Centre for Research Excellence will leave a legacy of creating the right conditions to answer emerging questions in a timely way - clearly demonstrating the benefits of interdisciplinary applied research that is necessary for successful integrated knowledge translation (e.g. understanding the health benefits of improving public housing) whilst fostering the creation of the next generation of healthy housing researchers equipped with knowledge and partnerships to take the Centre’s research impact forward.
The Healthy Housing CRE is administered from The University of Melbourne in the Centre for Health Policy.
Learn more about the Centres of Research Excellence funding scheme.
Centre objectives
As well as generating knowledge, the Healthy Housing CRE aims to:
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Transfer research outcomes into health policy and decision making in policy and practice at the State and Federal levels in Australia, and internationally via the World Health Organisation Healthy Housing platform
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Develop Australian research capacity in the interdisciplinary sectors of housing, health and policy implementation
Lead and instigate policy change that will address Australia’s housing-attributed disease.
Lead: Professor Andrew Beer
To advance the next generation of healthy housing researchers through inter-disciplinary collaborations and investment.
Lead: Dr Natasha Howard
Synergistic generation of new knowledge through collaboration and resource sharing.
Lead: Professor Rebecca Bentley