Australia is building real capability to spot emerging health threats and opportunities, but without national coordination it risks glimpsing isolated snapshots but not the full picture, according to a new Policy Primer released today by the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (AAHMS).

The Primer maps Australia’s health and medical science horizon scanning landscape for the first time. It is released as the Academy convenes national and international experts in Sydney for its 2026 Annual Meeting, Scanning Horizons: Science, Health and the Decade Ahead.

The Primer finds promising, growing capability across the system, including the new Australian Centre for Disease Control, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s research workforce audit and workforce supply and demand models, Medicines Australia’s annual horizon scanning forum, and CSIRO’s Our Future World megatrends report. It also highlights the National Health and Medical Research Strategy 2026–2036, which includes a recommendation that Australia develop a coordinated national horizon scanning capability.

According to the Primer, existing initiatives, which largely operate separately, will deliver the most value if they are connected through a nationally coordinated approach.

“COVID-19 showed us the potential cost of being caught unprepared, and AI is showing us how quickly the ground can shift beneath health and medicine,” said Professor Louise Baur AM PresAHMS, President of the Academy.

“Australia is looking ahead. Good work is happening in disease surveillance, workforce planning, health technology assessment and strategic foresight. The question is whether anyone is putting those pieces together, and whether they are feeding into the right decision-making processes.”

The Primer notes that fragmentation is especially costly in health. One new therapy can raise questions for regulation, reimbursement, clinical skills, manufacturing, data systems, equity of access, and community trust all at once. If each area is scanned in isolation, the dependencies between them can be missed.

“A breakthrough therapy doesn’t arrive as a single question. It arrives as a dozen questions at once,” said Professor Baur. “If we only look at each of them separately, we risk being ready on paper but unready in practice.”

Several comparable nations already run coordinated national scanning that feeds directly into planning and funding decisions, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Ireland and Malaysia.

“The National Health and Medical Research Strategy gives Australia a clear mandate. The next step is the operating model: who scans, how it is resourced, and who is accountable for responding,” said Professor Baur.

“The test of any horizon scanning system is simple. Does timely intelligence reach someone accountable for acting on it, and do they give a reasoned response? That’s the standard Australia should hold itself to.”

The Primer poses six questions to guide next steps, including which national decisions would benefit most from coordinated scanning, how to assess signals with limited evidence but potentially major consequences, and how a national capability could be piloted and scaled.

The Academy’s Annual Meeting commences on Thursday 22 October with a keynote from Sir Jeremy Farrar OBE FRS FMedSci, Chief of the Asia, Middle East and Europe Regional Division at PATH and former Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization. Over two days, speakers and participants will examine how Australia sets research priorities, how geopolitical shifts are reshaping research collaboration, how equity can be built into planning for the future, and emerging science from AI in health decision-making to quantum sensing in the brain.

The Policy Primer is available FOR DOWNLOAD here.

Appendix: Summary of example past and present Australian HMS horizon scanning initiatives

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