Australian Rotary Health Hat Night 2018
Don Munro as our chair for the night introduced our guests.
They were: Greg Ross chair of Australian Rotary Health (Board), District 9790 representative on the ARH Board, Rosemary Freeman, and Rotary Ambassador Terry Grant.
Our speaker, or should that be our tenor, Greg Ross, then began to sing his presentation. Rotarian Richard Luke then outlined some of the recent accomplishments of Australian Rotary Health (ARH) which included:
- a research project into Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS),
- funding research into mental health, which by the way affects 1 in 2 Australians at some time through their lifetimes
- support for an indigenous health program.
Phil Holmes together with his wife Cherie guests from Probus spoke of how they were interested in enlisting their organisation to the ARH cause.
We learned that Australian Rotary Health now has a staff of 7 in a permanent office all of which is paid for out of interest from the accumulated funds of ARH. Its income last year was $700,000 and this went toward supporting 760 applicants for research funding. The successful applicants are selected by an expert research committee. By this way ARH has become a conduit between young researchers and the money needed to fund their research.