Provincial Power

Health research organizations better position researchers for success

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By Amber Lepage-Monette

Provincial health research councils and foundations not only bring together widespread research efforts, but also flex their muscles to increase the provinces’ intake of federal granting funds, and push their researchers to excellence.

Eight provinces in Canada currently have these organizations, which provide funding support and work to promote and improve their local research communities.

Three of these health research organizations are notable for their longevity, unique structure and sheer scope.

The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (Edmonton, AB) and the Fonds de la recherche en Santé du Québec (FRSQ) (Montreal, QC) have been on the scene for 25 and 41 years, respectively, and while the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (Vancouver, BC) was only created four years ago, it has already become a powerful force.

For many in the health research community, the need to establish these types of organizations was obvious.

“There were so many different institutions in the province, that there was no province-wide effort, and a real need to strategically build the capacity for conducting health research,” says Michael Smith Foundation president and CEO Dr. Aubrey Tingle, PhD of the foundation’s creation.

“The rationale was to create an arms-length-from-government organization with a province-wide mandate to build (the) capacity for researchers in the province to conduct health research,” he says.

Created by an act of legislature, the Alberta Heritage Foundation stands out from the other organizations in that it was established with a dedicated endowment of excess provincial government revenues.

“It was intended to leave a legacy,” says Kevin Keough, PhD, president and CEO of the foundation.

“It was quite an innovative decision to take some provincial trust funds and put them aside for a very special purpose — which was the creation of the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research — thinking that this was a way to leave a special legacy to the people of Alberta,” he says. “And it certainly turned out to be that.”

The FRSQ, on the other hand, while created by the Quebec Ministry of Health, was a concept initially put forward by provincial researchers who wanted to increase Quebec’s competitive edge for research funds, explains FRSQ vice-president and scientific director Marielle Gascon-Barré, PhD.

Plenty to Offer

These health research organizations have some unique features that not only benefit provincial researchers, but often directly the public as well.

The FRSQ is noted for its publicly available database, searchable by researcher name, area of research or research centre.

The Alberta Heritage Foundation also maintains a searchable list of experts on its Web site. Additionally, it has a program designed to help decision-makers in the regional health authorities or other areas of the health-care or population-health sectors, who may need important data to make their decisions.

The Swift Efficient Application of Research and Community Health (SEARCH) program was created 10 years ago, Keough says, and has now become a stand-alone program that has proven its worth.

“It’s sort of an innovative way of doing knowledge translation in the health-care system that seems to have worked quite well over the years,” he says. “It’s enabled people to find new ways of getting evidence to help their decision-making, but it has also . . . promoted good contacts between the decision-makers and their research mentors.”

What all three organizations have in common is their mainstay: funding programs designed to support researchers.

The Alberta Heritage Foundation awards over $40 million each year through independent investigator programs, studentship and fellowship programs, and major scientific equipment grants.

To date, the Michael Smith Foundation has awarded approximately $76 million through scholar and trainee awards. Tingle explains that the foundation’s budget is divided into three areas: personnel support (60 per cent of the budget), infrastructure support (30 per cent) — which includes team support and provincial networks — and strategic new opportunities (10 per cent).

The FRSQ has an annual budget of $80 million, which it divides among its various funding programs, supporting 19 hospital-based research centres, junior and senior investigator scholarships, studentships and small projects.

To date, the FRSQ has funded approximately 400 researchers through its scholarship award program.

Gascon-Barré says one of the FRSQ’s main objectives is to support the careers of young researchers, which is why 24 per cent of the FRSQ’s budget goes toward its scholarship program.

“This has been very successful . . . because we can support (researchers’) salaries, whether they are basic scientists or clinician scientists,” she says. “So they can buy some time off (from) their clinic (and) other duties to do some research.”

Paying Their Own Way

Salary support is, in fact, one of the main ways in which these health research councils fund investigators in their provinces.

“By paying the salaries, our investigators are able to keep at least 75 per cent of their time free for research,” Keough explains. “They’re able to be quite competitive.”

It’s this strategy that truly benefits provinces with health research organizations, says Mark Bisby, PhD, vice-president of the research portfolio for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (Ottawa, ON).

“If the province will pay for the salaries that will attract talented people into that province, those talented people can then apply to us and other national funding agencies,” Bisby says.

With salary support, Bisby notes that researchers are then freed up to compete with others from across the country for CIHR funds that cover operating expenses.

“That’s a strategy that’s paid off very well for those provinces that have invested significant amounts in their own health agency,” he says.

Each of the three provincial health research organizations agree that by simply being available to their researchers, and by providing salary support, they have increased their respective provinces’ share of federal funding.

“British Columbia has 13 per cent of the national population. Part of the rationale of the creation in 2001 was at that time, British Columbia was getting approximately 8.5 per cent of national CIHR funding. As of this year, there have been four successive increases in the percentage, so that we’re currently around 11.6 per cent of national funding,” Tingle says of the Michael Smith Foundation.

“Obviously, there is more than one explanation for that, but it maps very closely with the creation of the foundation,” he adds.

Bisby agrees that through their own funding programs, provinces with health research organizations provide their researchers with leverage that does have an overall positive effect.

“The record shows that there are advantages to provinces that established significant provincial health research agencies, in terms of being able to acquire funding from federal agencies like CIHR,” he says.

Umbrella Organization

In 2003, having felt the benefits of having health research organizations, eight provinces — Alberta, British Columbia, Quebec, Manitoba, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan — formed the National Alliance of Provincial Health Research Organizations (NAPHRO).

NAPHRO brings the provincial organizations together in an effort to share information, identify collaboration opportunities and develop strategies to co-operate better with national agencies on programs that require partnerships or matching funds.

In this current landscape, however, Canada’s most populous province, which arguably has the highest proportion of health researchers, does not have a health research council. It’s a void that has been noted.

“(NAPHRO) is a terrifically positive development from CIHR’s perspective,” Bisby says.

“It provides a forum where we can be invited to talk about the relationship between the provincial and the federal funding agencies. It opens the door to us working together much better, to improving this symbiosis, eliminating overlap and seeing how we can contribute to each other’s objectives,” he says. “Ontario’s missing from that discussion.”

Tingle — who also serves as NAPHRO’s co-chair along with Krista Connell, the executive director of the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation (Halifax, NS) — agrees that Ontario’s absence is conspicuous.

“Each of the provinces has seen the value of creating an arms-length structure to facilitate and enhance peer review and set standards of excellence for that community,” Tingle says. “The biggest province, with the most health research in Canada, is the only province that has not done so.”

While there are likely many reasons why Ontario has not yet formed such a council, Tingle points out that its sheer size might play a part.

“Ontario has about 40 per cent of the health research in Canada, that’s what the data shows. So it’s a significant order of magnitude larger than most other ones,” Tingle says. “It’s a much larger group to try to work together with.”

Knowing that Ontario is missing from such discussions, the Ontario Health Research Alliance (OHRA) (Toronto, ON) was formed in 2000 to lobby for the creation of an Ontario health research council.

It’s a move that’s perhaps long overdue.

“It would be good to have the strongest performing province in health research in Canada at that table,” Bisby says.


Please see our upcoming May issue for more on this story, focusing on health research initiatives in Ontario.