Australia is supporting The Kids Research Institute Australia (a University of Western Australia affiliate) and its partners in unifying two decades of work on rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in the Pacific Region. The initiative introduces a new mechanism to grow and expand Pacific health leadership through the Fiji-based Pacific RHD Knowledge Hub. The Hub signifies a new era of coordinated, sustainable and impactful activity, addressing urgent unmet health needs in our region.

Australia is supporting the second phase of the Sydney Asia-Pacific Partnership for Health Innovations and Resilient Ecosystems (SAPPHIRE) to expand beyond Fiji, Kiribati and Vietnam and into Cambodia. In partnership with the University of Sydney, SAPPHIRE emphasises community participation, infectious and chronic disease control, health system strengthening, One Health adoption, climate change adaptation, and GEDSI integration for regional health security.

Our partnership with Australian Red Cross (ARC) is strengthening community capacity to prepare for and respond to epidemic disease threats in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. ARC and its partners, Fiji Red Cross, Solomon Islands Red Cross and Vanuatu Red Cross, will work with communities to increase knowledge and skills on epidemic disease awareness-raising, prevention and control, thereby improving disease surveillance and enhancing and extending national surveillance systems.

Through a collaboration with Indonesia’s Ministry of Agriculture, CSIRO’s Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (ACDP) is supporting Indonesia’s Disease Investigation Centre Wates (DIC Wates) to strengthen its national role in identifying and characterising avian influenza outbreaks across Indonesia.

CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre is supporting the governments of the Philippines and Fiji to adopt national digital health standards and health information exchange systems (interoperability) through the PHR Strengthening Standards Capability Project (SSCP).

The project’s objectives are to improve the ability of both countries’ health systems to share electronic health data in consistent and coordinated ways; and to build local expertise that can further develop and support these digital health systems.

In partnership with three Thai state-owned organisations, CSIRO’s Biotherapeutics team is improving Thailand’s capacity to manufacture essential drugs and improve local and equitable access to medicines. Project activities include trainings at CSIRO’s state-of-the-art facilities in Victoria, Australia where project partners are supported to perform end-to-end process development work on drugs selected by the Thai partners based on national priorities.

CSIRO’s Biotherapeutics team has partnered with the Malaysia Genome and Vaccine Institute (MGVI-NIBM) to build MGVI’s capability to manufacture vaccines, including a Leptospirosis vaccine.

CSIRO support is provided through in-person train‑the‑trainer programs – covering technology readiness and manufacturability assessment – and quality assessments and backstopping observation of MGVI staff.

The Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW) Pacific Health Information Support Hub (PHISH) aims to strengthen the health information management capabilities of Pacific Island Countries (PICs). PHISH provides support at the regional level, as well as working directly with Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu to improve their ability to collect, validate, analyse, and present health data to inform public health policy.

Australia’s partnership with Regional Emergency and Critical Care Systems Strengthening Initiative (RECSI) consortium will produce more resilient and equitable health systems across the Pacific and Timor-Leste by strengthening emergency and critical care capacity. RECSI will address capability gaps highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and advance World Health Assembly recommendations to strengthen universal health coverage.

This partnership will continue funding for ACIAR to deliver locally-led research across the Indo-Pacific region on the links between human and environmental health and food security, to inform public health interventions.