The WA Life Sciences Innovation Hub hosted our first WA MTP Sector Spotlight for 2025 last week, with an engaging fireside chat featuring WA Health Director General Dr Shirley Bowen. 120+ attendees from across academia, startups/SMEs, industry, and the public sector heard Dr Bowen share insights into WA Health’s priorities, challenges, and opportunities for innovation, as well as her personal drivers.
From a very young age, Dr Bowen’s passion to understand the “amazing machine” that is the human body drove her interest in medicine. Her experiences as an infectious disease specialist during the rise of HIV shaped her interest in public health policy and her understanding of the value of partnerships beyond the health system, including with industry. The sum of these experiences led her to step into health administration to help at a larger scale by acting at a system level. In her current role as Director General of WA Health, her desire is to support all Western Australians by improving our excellent health system to become even better.
A key focus of the discussion between Dr Bowen and WALSIH and MTPConnect’s National Stakeholder Engagement Coordinator Dr Tracey Wilkinson was WA Health’s approach to innovation, touching on areas like IP, mindset, and procurement. The influence of key trends shaping the future of healthcare – including digital transformation, artificial intelligence, precision medicine, and genomics – was clear. Dr Bowen also underscored the necessity of evolving the healthcare system to address emerging challenges, including ageing populations and child development. She highlighted the importance of innovation in shaping the future of healthcare and expressed her hope that, one day, innovation would be embedded in everyone’s job description.
Addressing the challenges facing the WA health system, Dr Bowen pointed to workforce fatigue, financial sustainability, the need for increased productivity, and the potential for innovative solutions incorporating robotics and/or AI to mitigate these challenges while ensuring access to high-quality healthcare services for all Western Australians.
Dr Bowen attended the AusBiotech 2024 conference as part of the WA delegation and shared her takeaways and reflections from this experience: her appreciation of the size and interest in the biotech sector and how WA could convert its existing strengths into a big success story.
Looking ahead, improving healthcare delivery, empowering the workforce, and fostering a culture of clinical transformation and digital innovation are all priorities for WA Health. Discussing some practical actions as positive steps in fostering research and innovation in more depth, Dr Bowen pointed to streamlining ethics approval processes; WA Health’s new IP policy, which aims to accelerate healthcare innovation and commercialisation; the funding opportunities offered by the Future Health Research and Innovation (FHRI) Fund; and the establishment of innovation hubs within hospitals. She also emphasised the importance of growing the number of clinician-researchers and the need to support them by releasing time for research activities.
The conversation underscored the need for the public sector to focus on innovation, collaboration, and evidence-based research, reinforcing the importance of adapting to an evolving healthcare landscape.
The audience peppered Dr Bowen with questions, which continued into a networking session that set the tone for a dynamic and collaborative year of innovation for the WA health and medical life sciences sector.
