Ireland could become a world player in research if we could only see its primary value, writes Prof Desmond Fitzgerald
A novel way of looking at the health service is to recognise it as a major intellectual resource for the advancement of the country. The health service is made up of more than 100,000 people who use their talent and skills, sometimes in difficult conditions, to protect health, to provide medical treatment and to care for those unable to look after themselves.
This service includes many of the best trained and most highly skilled people in the workforce.
They include doctors, nurses, therapists, laboratory scientists, psychologists, social workers and health managers. Most are graduates and have strong links to the higher education sector.
Not only do these professionals treat illness and protect health, but they have the knowledge, skills and the motivation to make a major contribution to the economic and social development of the country. Why?
Because today's health research is tomorrow's health care. Every cardiac intervention, every cancer treatment, every MRI scan, every joint replacement carried out in our health service is based on previous research, involving biologists, biochemists, physicists, engineers, physicians, surgeons, nurses and therapists.
The primary motivation for and benefit of this research is to make people healthier, but it has done more than that. It has generated a most profitable business - biotechnology.
In this country, we benefit from the fruits of this research every time we require a medical intervention. We also benefit economically from the biotechnology revolution, thanks to the success of the IDA in attracting to Ireland the world's leading pharmaceutical and medical device companies to manufacture the drugs and medical devices produced by research elsewhere. The same is true in information and communications technology.
What we have been slower to realise is that health professionals in Ireland could be generating much more of the research that will underpin the next phase of biotechnology and ICT development. If that knowledge could be generated here, it would add greater value to our society and economy and contribute to the sustainability of our nascent pharmaceutical industry.
There is a particular field of health research in which Ireland could become world class, research related to the clinical care of patients. If Irish health researchers had the kinds of support and resources that are common elsewhere, there is no doubt that Ireland could be leading the world in research in a number of clinical areas where we are already strong - for example in developing new treatments for diabetes, in understanding the immune system and how it deals with infections, in producing healthier foods and in preventing and treating degeneration of the brain and nervous system.
The time has never been better to recognise the opportunity for the health system to conduct research of benefit to patients and to generate wealth through biotechnology.
The Government's commitment of funding for research in third-level institutions through the Higher Education Authority has meant that our universities and institutes of technology have an unprecedented capacity to conduct research in the life sciences.
Similarly, the investment by Science Foundation Ireland in research related to biotechnology has attracted outstanding researchers from abroad to our universities and has enabled a few leading health researchers to concentrate their time on research.
However, the full return on this welcome investment by the HEA and by SFI will only be realised if the knowledge that is being developed in the laboratory is informed by and tested in real-life situations, with the involvement of clinicians and patients. Only then will it be clear if this new knowledge has practical relevance and can be developed for the benefit of patients and society.
The good news is that the right decisions are being taken. Thanks to the Investment Programme in Research for Health and Wealth, approved by the Tánaiste, Mary Harney TD last year, the Health Research Board is funding the physical infrastructure, the people and the programmes in clinical research that will tap and support the expertise already in the health service.
It is working with the Wellcome Trust to provide clinical research facilities as part of an Ireland and UK initiative. It is working with the IDA in funding a national centre for research imaging that will send a strong message to the healthcare industry about the quality of clinical research in Ireland.
We need a contract for medical consultants that is more sympathetic to research. We need to make the health service more supportive of clinical trials. We need every health agency to see research as a core activity.
Prof Desmond Fitzgerald is chairman of the Health Research Board. He was recently elected to the American Association of Physicians