While the Madness of the RQF Rumbles on the NHMRC Undertakes an "External Audit". (September 12, 2007)

The chief executive of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Monash University's Head of the School of Biomedical Sciences, Warwick Anderson told  The Australian's Bernard Lane: "There's never been a review of the NHMRC's procedures and the funding vehicles and how well they serve the aims and purposes of the NHMRC and the strategic plan."

Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research had been picked to chair the review. Toni Scarpa, director of the US National Institutes of Health Centre for Scientific Review, and Australian-based biotech executive Merilyn Sleigh will round out the "tribunal".

Professor Anderson told Mr Lane the review would embrace everything from project and program grants through to training awards and fellowships to the peer review process.

Any recommendations made will be considered for implementation from 2009.

What has prompted this soul searching is the perception that the NHMRC is "a bit of an inward-looking organisation (and that it) looks like friends giving friends grants".  Therefore, the council has organised lay people -- for example from industry -- to observe selection panels.

Professor Anderson was concerned that the agency had moved too far away from external review during the last funding triennium of 2003-06, and he told Mr Lane that external review was especially important for Australia, where it could be difficult to get the spread of expertise necessary on grant panels. For example one panel might have to straddle fields as diverse as cardiology, nephrology and dentistry: "It's inevitable that more and more review of grant applications themselves will be international." Currently overseas experts are flown in, mostly for panel work; otherwise it's "primarily an Australian-based peer review system".

Two of the matters of predominant concern are how to make sure that peer review can  identify "really innovative proposals" and fostering translational research, i.e. translating new knowledge obtained through basic research to the clinic.