A health science city

Is everyone in our island truly convinced that a good future lies ahead in investment in more research and development? Looking at the structure of Mater Dei Hospital, being visited by hundreds of Maltese, many of whom were astounded by the sheer vastness of the foyer, one at first gets the idea that this place will house the future needs for research and development in the health field.

However the witty, budding science-oriented young people visiting the hospital on a tour last Sunday asked what will all that space be occupied with? The answer was 'shops', and that the foyer would look like a village town centre or piazza.

Then they were shown the tiny windows where the pharmacists in a few months' time would be giving advice to patients through a small hole, more like a cloister's area and not so conducive to practise what they are taught as state-of-the-art pharmaceutical care.

And all this in what is to be a hospital where patient care is to be deemed supreme. One also understands that no improvement is envisaged when the outpatient pharmacy is transferred to Mater Dei, where patients will still have to wait for a lousy service for hours in a long queue.

When the tour continued the students posed another question, when told by some that Mater Dei is the Smart City of Health: where are the research laboratories similar to the ones that are well known to be at San Raffaele in Milan?

Was not the new hospital centre to serve as a Mediterranean research centre for such areas as diabetes? Where are the research laboratories to be situated and when are the researchers going to be employed?

How many research fellows and research assistants exist in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery? And what happened to the promised towers that had to accommodate the Medical School and the Institute of Health Care?

It appears that in the euphoria entailed with the developments in achieving excellence in information technology, one decided to place all the eggs in one basket, forgetting about all the other possibilities that are required to fulfil the needs and aspirations of our young people.

The Economist (March 3-9) issue, in an article entitled "Out of the dusty labs", mentioned how the old successful plan, whereby universities researched basic science and then industry developed these findings to the point where they could get to the market, is now out of date.

The boundary between research and development is now blurred. The 'R' and 'D' must today be a continuum. There is little distinction between scientists or medicals in white coats and scruffy engineers or white collar software developers.

There is today no more holding of the idea of "technology transfer". It is all in a team. The new Mater Dei Hospital will have a wealth of ideas and an enormous amount of invaluable data which, if combined in a team milieu, involving also engineers, be they mechanical, electronic or software, and perhaps chemists and biologists, could lead to innovations which could land in the market.

It is only in this way that the finances essential to run the showpiece Mater Dei Hospital could be made available. This is how hospitals like San Raffaele make money. We need to start by liaising with the pharmaceutical industry and run state-of-the-art clinical trials, including simple trials, such as bioequivalence studies, which are today being run in countries in Eastern Europe and as far away as South Africa, involving pharmaceutical products developed in Malta.

This activity did not receive the full support of the local health system, so that products could be brought to the market through a complete Maltese R&D process. It is not that we do not have talented persons (although we do need more post graduate students) but the problem lies in that there is little infrastructure support for research in the health field.

Departments in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery are poorly funded to carry out research or plainly not funded at all. We have a gold mine for R&D in Mater Dei. We all need to work hard and join forces in a team effort to develop this wealth of ideas and data wisely that will render a good dividend and which can be used first to retain in Malta our extraordinary gifted health professionals by providing them with extra income through their participation in R&D activities; and secondly to have training facilities to sustain the excellence of the Mater Dei Hospital Complex and develop it further into a health science city.