Professor Steve Wesselingh
BMBS ’82, PhD(Med) ’92
By David Sly
As Chief Executive Officer of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Professor Steve Wesselingh advocates for closer ties between hospitals and research facilities – and he points to Flinders University as a shining example that underlines the great benefits from such close collaboration.
Adelaide-born Professor Wesselingh, who went through secondary school at Marion High School, was part of the third intake of students at Flinders University’s School of Medicine before he commenced doctoral training at Flinders University and Flinders Medical Centre. Through his dual roles as a clinician and researcher at Flinders, he saw the seamless integration of research with hospital practices – which he says has underlined his belief in the importance of placing research at the heart of the health sector.
“Ironically, it’s now 50 years after Flinders started, and the Academy of Health and Science has recently released a major paper on the value of embedding research into health. Flinders started with that philosophy. It was seamless. You wouldn’t\ know if you were in the hospital or the medical school, they\ worked that closely together – so I always assumed that everyone worked that way. It’s such a pity they don’t. I still\ believe that universities and hospitals should be so closely tied.”
Professor Wesselingh notes that the opening of the new Health and Medical Research Building at Bedford Park in 2024 reinforces Flinders’ leading position in building closer ties between a working hospital and university research facility. “That’s how we improve health and best deal with the health challenges we face,” he says. “This same philosophy also has to be replicated in rural and remote settings. Sure, it starts in the big metropolitan facilities, but for the sake of health equity for all people in this country, it has to apply throughout the nation.”
Arriving at the New School
Professor Wesselingh’s journey in medicine encompasses a wealth of medical experience, clinical leadership, as well as national and international research success – and he remembers his experiences as a student at Flinders setting him on the right path to taste such success.
“When I arrived at Flinders Medical School, everything was so very new – not only the buildings, but also the innovative curriculum and the people teaching, who were quite young and enthusiastic – so it had a terrific, very vital atmosphere,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to go to staid old Adelaide University.
I wanted to go to the more radical, interesting new campus. “Flinders’ medical course also allowed me to spend 25% of my time doing other subjects – so I also studied economics and sociology, which I was both very interested in and ultimately became very important planks of knowledge that I built on through my career. In medicine, you need to draw on a lot of other skills, so encouraging this broader education certainly helped me understand the broader impacts of the social determinants on health.”
He specialised in infectious diseases training after being inspired through a three-month elective spent in Papua New Guinea. “It was an opportunity Flinders provided for me as a medical student. Under Peter McDonald and John Findlay- Jones at Flinders, I was urged to do a PhD to focus on this interest. It wasn’t a case of whether you’d do a PhD, but more a case of when was I starting – and that expectation was a terrific way to make you seriously focus.”
Transition from Research to Leadership
Professor Wesselingh’s eventual transition from researcher and clinician to health organisation leader began after a post-doc at Johns Hopkins, with his move to Melbourne to head the newly merged Fairfield Hospital and Alfred Infectious Diseases Unit in the early 1990s, during the worst part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He later moved to the Burnet Institute, addressing infectious diseases, immunology and major public health issues affecting disadvantaged communities in Australia, then became Dean of Medicine at Monash University.
He returned to Adelaide to head the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), facing the daunting task of establishing the direction and purpose of the new institution from its inception. “When I arrived, things were only just getting started, I worked out of an office in King William Street, so everything – the building, the staff, the research programs – had to be created from the ground up. I’m so proud that it continues to fulfil its purpose as South Australia’s really strong independent medical research institute.”
After 12 years at SAHMRI, his transition to head NHMRC in 2023 was pre-empted by Professor Wesselingh chairing the NHMRC research committee for five years, and working very closely with previous NHMRC CEO Professor Anne Kelso, particularly on gender equity initiatives. “What appealed to me most about accepting this job was obtaining a national view on policy and research strategy. I’m keen that NHMRC and the other national bodies all think very keenly about national policy and strategy, so that we can deliver what leading researchers need to perform at their best.”
Focusing on Future Funding
Two big tasks Professor Wesselingh wants to achieve are creating harmony between Australia’s two main health research funding bodies – NHMRC and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) – and developing a national health and medical research strategy, which currently does not exist.
“While we are doing this, we have to keep looking at health provision through an equity lens, so that we don’t increase gaps in the diversity of our research workforce or health outcomes. It can easily happen that medical research gets centralised in bigger cities, so that people in those cities get better health. We have to make sure all of our research outcomes are equitable and can reach the most people possible.”
His expertise in infectious diseases was especially significant during the COVID pandemic. “It was a completely new situation for everyone, so the work of our public health officers and their departments in Australia was incredible,” he says. “We probably could have worked together better as a nation rather than individual states, but smart public health modelling was fantastic in preparing necessary responses, and I think that going forward, work with the new Australian Centre for Disease Control, when established, can help to make a national approach to solving problems more likely.”
His thinking continually points to a need for greater cohesion between all parties and people working together in the health sector. “It circles back to the cohesion between research and clinical practice being a fundamental aspect of efficient and effective public health systems,” says Professor Wesselingh. “You want to bring the universities, the health system and the medical research institutes close together to solve the big challenges.”
He sees these priorities as the equitable and assessable delivery of health care, especially with servicing and staffing rural and remote care, and aged care, which will keep growing in importance in Australia. “Neurological disease – and particularly dementia – is going to be a big issue very soon, because of the growing numbers of people affected in Australia. All of this points to how we use innovation in health appropriately, because Artificial Intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change health delivery in this country. We already use AI in radiology, research and drug development – but that is only the start of things. Health delivery never stands still.”