Spoken by Professor Alex Parker—Executive Director, Institute for Health and Sport, Victoria University

What you can see now is Victoria University’s research building and it’s a very exciting opportunity for Victoria University to be part of the hospital and be so linked to our health partners at Western Health.

Victoria University is the largest university in Melbourne’s West and we’re co-located now within this great health hub which will enable us to do so much more of our health-related research. We are expecting in this building to have more capacity to see more members of the community, to offer them some more clinical trials, we’re looking at ways in which we can improve healthy ageing, how we can prevent chronic disease, how we can work with our health partners to make sure that the community of the West can live longer and healthier lives, and we do that through research in this building.

We’ll have some floors where we can do some work, and a research gym is one of the largest ones that’s in this area that really helps with rehabilitation for people that perhaps need some help to get back into exercise after having a stroke or having cardiovascular disease or diabetes, and then we can also offer some nutrition trials for people that perhaps are struggling with their weight as a consequence of the illnesses that they have, and then we’ve also got this fantastic new space in this building that’s really around yoga and mindfulness.

We’re really keen to be able to open that up as an opportunity to enhance people’s health and well-being as they’re coming to the hospital as outpatients, or also for Western Health staff as well because we know the health and well-being of the staff that work at the forefront is so critical for them to be able to keep doing their work.

This research building will support the work of more than 300 researchers. These are a mix of our research staff and also our higher degree research students. The facilities in this space, 2,000 square meters, do enable so much more new scale work and new equipment in this building. For example, we’ve got over $3.1 million of new equipment that’s going to be a full-scale PC2 lab, so that enables biomedical research.

This research building will enable us to increase our capacity in the amount of clinical trials that we do, and we know in most areas of health that research really serves alongside health delivery in a really good way, so it sometimes offers new treatments to be tested, sometimes it adds additional treatments that gets greater health outcomes for patients and so we’re really looking forward to continuing our partnership with Western Health to be able to deliver on that in the future.

I think our staff and students are most excited about having this consolidated health, research and clinical space, and knowing the value of it being embedded in the hospital and our partnership with Western Health. Everyone is really excited about having facilities that are world-class and ready to be used to make a real difference. Everything that we do is about “how do we improve people’s quality of life?”.