Sowing the seeds of impact

In 2023, Dr Carolyn Mazariego was awarded a Health Systems Research Theme Collaborative Grant supporting her project ‘Patient centred care in action: Development of a national strategy and pathway for adoption of patient reported outcome data collection into routine cancer care in Australia.’ 

Carolyn is the Deputy Director, Implementation to Impact (i2i) at the School of Population Health and is a leader in the integration of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into routine cancer care to facilitate more person-centred, data-driven health systems. 

She has secured more than $22 million in competitive research funding from the NHMRC, MRFF, Cancer Institute NSW and other national partners.

Through collaborations with health services and government agencies, her research aims to translate evidence into sustainable changes in clinical practice and policy.

Advancing person-centred cancer care through patient-reported outcomes

The PROActive project, funded through a UNSW Health Systems Research Collaborative Seed Grant, brought together clinicians, policymakers, researchers and consumers to develop national priorities for embedding patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into routine cancer care.

Through a national workshop and collaborative consultation process, the project identified six priority action areas to support the sustainable and integrated use of PROs across the Australian cancer system. The work highlighted the role of PROs in enabling more personalised care by systematically capturing patients’ symptoms, wellbeing and experiences throughout the cancer care journey.

The recommendations from this work were published in The Lancet eClinicalMedicine, positioning PROs as a critical enabler of personalised cancer care and providing a roadmap for health systems seeking to implement these approaches at scale.

The impact of the PROActive project has extended beyond academia into national cancer policy. The recommendations have been cited in Cancer Australia’s Principles of Cancer Survivorship, helping inform national guidance on person-centred, data-driven survivorship care.

Why this work matters for health systems research

Carolyn’s work demonstrates how health systems research can bridge the gap between evidence, clinical practice and policy. By bringing together clinicians, policymakers, researchers and consumers to co-design priorities for patient-reported outcomes, the PROActive project has helped create a shared national vision for how patient experience data can be used to improve cancer care.

Patient-reported outcomes are increasingly recognised internationally as a critical component of high-quality health systems. Integrating these measures into routine care enables clinicians to better understand patient needs, supports more personalised treatment decisions, and provides health systems with actionable data to improve quality and outcomes.

This work highlights the important role of seed funding in enabling collaborative research that can catalyse broader change. By generating consensus on implementation priorities and translating these insights into policy-relevant recommendations, the PROActive project demonstrates how health systems research can contribute to more responsive, person-centred cancer care across Australia.