- Grant to evaluate NSW’s reformed court diversion laws
Dr Christel Macdonald, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NDARC, was recently awarded a research grant from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to explore the impact of legislative changes on mental health diversion in the NSW Local Court.
The project is titled ‘Has reform delivered? A mixed-methods study of diversion outcomes and case processing under the Mental Health and Cognitive Impairment Forensic Provisions Act 2020’.
The team, including researchers from NDARC and the Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network, will be using a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the impact of the recent law reforms to answer the following key questions:
- Has court processing time improved under the new Act?
- Have diversion rates increased compared with the previous scheme?
- How do clinicians and lawyers - who work directly with the Act but are rarely included in research - view its operation in practice?
Their aim is to finalise the project by mid-2027, and hope to contribute to improving diversion and treatment access in this vulnerable population.
Read about the importance of this research here.
- $4.2 million to explore rapidly shifting drug use patterns
The world’s largest longitudinal linked data platform on illicit drug use patterns in Australia will be created through a $4.2 million grant awarded to the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) at UNSW Sydney.
The project will be led by NDARC’s Professor Rebecca McKetin and will bring together leading world experts in drug use and data modelling to transform the way we understand illicit drug use.
The five-year project, funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Ideas Grant scheme, will recruit 9000 adults to collect granular information about illicit drug use and track health outcomes through linkage to administrative health records.
Advanced data modelling will be used to understand how many people are using illicit drugs, how different patterns of drug use cluster with specific health risks, and how these health risks are influenced by contextual factors, such as socioeconomic disadvantage.
The data platform will also be embedded in Australia’s national drug monitoring systems to help identify and respond to emerging illicit drug trends.
Collaborators include the Burnet Institute, the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, Peer Based Harm Reduction WA, and the Emerging Drugs Network of Australia, as well as the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of Otago in New Zealand.
Read full media release here.
