DVA’s research priorities

The current research priority areas are (in no particular order):

• Wellbeing: understanding key drivers of wellbeing for veterans and their families, including an emphasis on primary and secondary interventions that improve whole of life wellbeing outcomes.
• Right care: understanding healthcare interventions that definitively improve the wellbeing of veterans and their families, including reducing over-diagnosis, over-treatment and other forms of waste.
• Service impact: understanding the unique impacts of serving in the Australian Defence Force (ADF).
• Suicide: understanding the risk factors, prevalence and impacts of suicide as well as treatments and preventions.
• Compensation: understanding the impacts of interacting with compensation systems and how potentially negative outcomes can be minimised.
• Exposures: understanding the impacts of occupational exposures that are uniquely associated with serving in the ADF.

DVA’s approach in commissioning research provides evidence to support the health and wellbeing needs of Australia’s veterans and their families. Targeted research bridges knowledge gaps, so DVA better understands the needs of our clients and anticipates future needs.

The Strategic Research Framework and research priorities help inform:

• the way the department interacts with clients 
• policies and programs to support the wellbeing of veterans and their families
• health service delivery and outcomes for clients
• our knowledge base on how veterans and their families fare across the various facets of their lives
• our understanding of how effective some of our services, programs and trials have been. 

Our strategic partnership with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) also support this. The AIHW is developing data assets to help DVA understand current information gaps on how veterans and their families fare across education, employment, justice & safety, housing, finance and social support.