Why GenV is significant

Fast, large-scale, responsive and readily-applied, policy-driven research is needed to solve the many problems that children experience today and to prevent adverse outcomes as adults in the future.

Australia—and Victoria in particular—has world-class longitudinal studies and trial capabilities, many of which the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) has helped to build.

However, despite the immense value of these studies, traditional research designs are too cumbersome, expensive, piecemeal and inflexible to generate the necessary solutions at a pace that can benefit the coming generation.

A whole-of-state snapshot for valuable insights and precision policy design

Few children’s studies involve more than 5000 children – most are much smaller. Studies an order of magnitude greater are needed to discern important patterns from ‘noise.’

GenV is creating large, parallel whole-of-state child and parent cohorts for discovery and interventional research.

It is designed to address physical, mental and social issues experienced during childhood, as well as the antecedents of a wide range of diseases of ageing.

GenV will generate translatable evidence (prediction, prevention, treatments, and services) to improve future wellbeing.

In time, this will reduce the future disease burden of all children and the adults they become.

Innovation meets efficiency: leveraging existing Victorian infrastructure

Leveraging Victoria’s infrastructure to collect, enhance and link existing records and services data, and minimal check-ins for information that is not routinely collected, GenV will build a more holistic view of childhood while being low burden on families. This is designed to enhance uptake and retention across the lifecourse.

GenV will create large and complex datasets within the GenV Data Repository, designed to integrate with Victoria’s developing data linkage capacity.

With the collected, enhanced and linked datasets created by high-uptake, high-retention, parallel whole-of-state parent and child cohorts, GenV’s data will become a significant resource to analysts including researchers, service providers and policy makers.

A holistic approach to policy, research and data

GenV offers an exciting opportunity to embed policy thinking into the development and implementation of the world’s largest cohort of children and their parents, here in Victoria.

For the first time, policymakers will have data with the breadth and depth needed to not only plan for the potential policy solutions of now, but the policy solutions for the next decade. These future solutions could fundamentally reshape the opportunities of the next generation of children being born today.

GenV provides a solutions platform that offers the unique chance to consider the full range of policy “moving parts”, including:

• service delivery across all sectors including health, education, and social care
• the environments children are growing up in (e.g. communities), and
• the often elusive outcomes that include children’s health, development, learning and wellbeing.