Australia has world class health and medical researchers who have been responsible for many life changing breakthroughs that have benefitted the Australian and international community.
The ability to conduct this research in Australia depends on being able to recruit enough people into studies which can take many months and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to do. Many studies fall over at this hurdle because they just don't get enough people to participate.
That’s why The George Institute in partnership with the University of New South Wales has launched a register called Join Us, which aims to recruit a million Australians who agree to be contacted if there is a study that might be appropriate for them.
The Filipino Nursing Diaspora (FiND) Network is a group that is on the rise and with great vision of extending help, up-skilling, empowering, and inspiring Filipino Nurses around the world. Recently, FiND Network became a partner organisation to “Join Us’. Prof. Violeta Lopez, the Network’s president said ‘With this project, we are pleased to be collaborating with partners and significant stakeholders.’ ‘Filipino Australians represent the fifth largest migrant community in Australia, equivalent to 3.8 per cent of Australia’s overseas-born population and 1.1 per cent of Australia’s total population. Despite being one of the largest and rapidly expanding migrant groups, health needs of Filipino Australians are poorly understood and not fully assessed”, she further said.
“Oftentimes, health data on Filipino Australians are lacking because they are typically aggregated with other migrant subgroups. Consequently, this practice yields critical research implications as data aggregation masks the health needs of the most vulnerable groups in the CALD -culturally and linguistically diverse-- population”, according to Jerome Babate, executive director of FiND Network.
Jayson Catiwa, FiND Network’s Director and Project Manager remarked, “Understanding the wider needs of the Filipino Australian community is important in planning and provision of local health services, and to better serve the community”.
Ultimately, the goal of this project is to achieve better health and wellbeing for all Australians by more rapidly advancing the understanding of health and medicine and making these advances available to the community.
To register or find out more visit www.joinus.org.au.