CIHR Internal Assessment - Report for the 2011 International Review

[ Table of Contents ]

Part 4: CIHR 2005–2010

Achievements related to Blueprint, CIHR's first strategic plan

The first five-year strategic plan, CIHR's Blueprint for Health Research and Innovation, or Blueprint, was published in 2003–2004. Therefore, during the first International Review in 2006, CIHR was in the middle of the period covered by Blueprint. Now that CIHR's second strategic plan, Health Research Roadmap: Creating innovative research for better health and health care, 2009–2010 to 2013–2014, or Roadmap, has superseded it, CIHR's can report on its Blueprint objectives.

Blueprint committed CIHR to follow five strategic directions (Box 1). Highlights of CIHR's actions that address the five strategic directions, and in which the institutes have been key players, include:

• support for new funding programs to encourage high-risk research and novel collaborations, with the growth of CIHR-funded researchers from 9,640 in 2003–2004 to 13,790 in 2009–2010

• rapid launching of research programs that address emerging threats to public health including SARS and pandemic influenza

• support for large cohort studies, research data centres and the Cochrane Collaboration; launch of several joint institute/corporate-funded large strategic initiatives, e.g., Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine (Box 2), and Global Health

• continued growth in the support for research in health services and population health research (Figure 4B)

• an emphasis on the health of vulnerable populations, with a quadrupling of funding in this area from $10.8 million to $44.6 million between 2003–2004 and 2008–2009

• a revitalized approach to KT, emphasizing partnerships with knowledge users and researcher education about the relevance and meaning of KT to all themes of health research, to the extent that the KT function is one of the features of CIHR that is best known internationally

CIHR expected that these actions would result in a number of outcomes, grouped under five broad headings. Table 6 lists in detail the broad and specific Blueprint objectives, and in the second column are listed the actions to which CIHR committed. The third column reports on the outcomes achieved; in some cases, these are described in quantitative terms, in others as examples of actions taken. Many of the individual items mentioned in the table are described in more detail elsewhere in this report and in the institute reports.

Table 6: Blueprint achievements

Outstanding research

Outstanding researchers in innovative environments

Transforming research into action

Effective partnerships and public engagement

Organizational excellence

Results of and responses to first International Review

CIHR's first International Review Panel (IRP) concluded that CIHR was meeting its mandate and all 13 institutes were working well. The IRP was impressed by the progress made in developing a more unified model of health research funding. The capacity to fund research across all health-related disciplines had clearly been enhanced and new strategic initiatives had strengthened multidisciplinary research and training. The IRP concluded that it was too early to make conclusive judgments as to the effectiveness of the CIHR model of health research funding. The report offered observations for CIHR to consider in the next stage of its evolution. These are listed below in italics, with CIHR's response. In some cases, the IRP's advice validated actions already in progress.

Governance and management

"Accountability and transparency need to be reinforced at all levels of the organization. Governing Council (GC) should consider its position as the main board of the organization and a single research committee should be established to account for all research expenditures."

GC has clarified its strategic governance role and assumed the role of Board of Directors. It has delegated its responsibilities for scientific matters, including approval of funding awarded in CIHR's competitions, to a newly constituted Scientific Council. GC now concentrates on broad strategic direction setting and provides strategic advice.

"Rapid growth and the challenges associated with matrix management across the CIHR Institutes and Ottawa has created management challenges within CIHR leading to the conclusion that the executive team needs expanding and strengthening. The most appropriate structure for handling these issues should be considered after an organizational review."

Two organizational reviews were conducted by external consultants and their recommendations have been implemented to strengthen the management team, with realigned responsibilities (Table 1).

"Scientific Directors (SD) should now be given further responsibility to oversee the panel/activity in their scientific area. It would also seem reasonable that a future role of SDs might be to form the core of the central committee replacing RPPC responsible for allocation of the whole research budget."

"The crucial leadership role played by the SDs led the IRP to consider the succession challenges associated with moving CIHR Institutes every five to seven years and believe this is a significant issue as institutional memory will be lost. Options should be considered for ensuring the smooth transition of the institutes."

Turnover of SDs is now routine, and dedicated resources and processes facilitate the transition. The increased experience of Ottawa-based institute staff ensures continuity of institutional memory. The benefits of regular institute leadership renewal outweigh the inevitable disruptions.

Programs and peer review

"Rapid growth, particularly of new strategic initiatives and peer review panels, has led to excessive complexity. This complexity needs to be reduced to enable opportunities and activities to be both focused and manageable."

The proliferation of funding programs has been costly with respect to peer review. For the 149 operating grant programs in operation in 2009–2010, review of applications involved 125 review committees. The Scientific Council has moved to reduce the number of strategic initiatives and focus on fewer, larger, multi-institute or pan-CIHR opportunities. It has adopted a critical, centralized approval system for strategic initiatives based on the number of institutes involved, scope, cost and duration.

"The peer review system that is responsible for handling most of the research funding is currently under strain and requires more academic leadership. A review of its processes and structure is necessary."

Reform of the peer review system is one of the key deliverables of CIHR's new strategic plan (Roadmap). Meanwhile, a streamlining process allows triage of uncompetitive the applications, enabling review committees to focus on those in contention.

"Since teams and collaborations often form unpredictably and in a more bottom-up approach in response to complex problems, CIHR should develop a flexible and responsive approach to promote multidisciplinary research."

The largest and most flexible program is the Open Operating Grant Program, which has no limitations on number of applicants or requested grant size and, increasingly, "self-assembling" research teams are applying for funding through these competitions.

Knowledge translation

"There remains lack of clarity about the definition of knowledge translation (KT) across the organization."

CIHR is now recognized as a leader among funding agencies in its approach to KT. "CIHR has taken a bold stand in leading the advancement of this agenda. Hopefully other funding agencies will follow suit".³⁶ It has refined its definition of KT, making a distinction between "end of grant" KT, where information is disseminated to those who need to use it at the end of a research project, and "integrated" KT where the users of research knowledge are engaged in all phases of a research project, from formulating the research question to applying the findings. It has adopted the Knowledge to Action framework to guide its approach to KT.³⁷

To educate the research community about the concepts and practical processes of KT, CIHR commissioned the development of four KT learning modules,³⁸ produced a series of KT Casebooks,³⁹ and published the book, Knowledge Translation in Health Care, which provides the state of the theory and research evidence behind studying and doing KT.⁴⁰ CIHR also provides the majority of support for the work of the Cochrane Collaboration in Canada. Annual expenditures on grants and awards to support KT rose from $350,000 in 2001–2002 to $18.2 million in 2009–2010.

An important recent KT development is CIHR's Evidence on Tap program, designed to engage federal, provincial and territorial ministries of health by meeting their need to inform policy making with research evidence. This program brings together in Best Brains Exchanges CIHR-funded researchers and policy makers to discuss in confidence the evidence about the particular health issues on which a ministry is seeking advice. At the request of ministries, CIHR also funds research teams to provide expedited knowledge synthesis of the evidence in areas of interest. The Evidence on Tap program has been warmly received by policy makers: "Now you hear the Deputy Minister talk about CIHR all the time. He talks about Best Brains and says that what we're trying to do is accomplish fundamental change and that CIHR, with the Best Brains, is helping us to achieve this."⁴¹

Since CIHR's Institutes are strongly linked to the researcher and knowledge user communities, they play a critical role in promoting and facilitating the dissemination and application of CIHR research results. Increasingly, the institutes have embraced their role in supporting and promoting researchers' KT efforts as well as evolving their own role as knowledge brokers. To guide their individual approaches, institutes now include KT activities as integral parts of their strategic plans.

"More attention should be directed at providing leadership in the area of technology commercialization."

The introduction of the Tri-Council Centres for Excellence in Commercialization of Research and the business-led Networks of Centres of Excellence have boosted CIHR's spend on commercialization activity. Nevertheless, challenges remain. In the latest fiscal year, CIHR investments in the Proof of Principle program decreased significantly (Figure 19). This program requires matching contributions from industry, reflecting the difficulties Canadian industry is facing in acquiring venture capital for research and development, and the relatively low and decreasing "big pharma" R&D investment in Canada (Figure 20). To overcome these challenges, CIHR has appointed a Commercialization Advisory Committee, which includes experts in commercialization, technology transfer, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, and company management. The committee has helped to redesign CIHR's commercialization funding opportunities to improve outcomes in these difficult economic times.

Figure 19: CIHR spending on commercialization programs

Figure 19 long description

Figure 20A: Venture capital investments in the life sciences in Canada

A: Data from Annual Statistical Reports of Canada's Venture Capital and Private Equity Association

Figure 20A long description

Figure 20B: R&D to sales ratio, Canada and seven comparator countries

B: Amended from Figure 23, Patented Medicine Prices Review Board 2008 Annual Report

Figure 20B long description

Ethics

"CIHR should increase its emphasis on research in ethics as well as its governance responsibilities that ensure that the research that it funds meets the highest ethical standards."

There have been major developments in both research on ethics, and ethical standards in health research, as advised by the IRP. The ethics function at CIHR consists of the Standing Committee on Ethics to advise GC, the Ethics Office to lead and coordinate CIHR's mandate in ethics and ethics designates on all Institute Advisory Boards to provide advice to institutes. The Ethics Office also supports GC's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which reviews all research involving human pluripotent stem cells to determine its conformity to the CIHR Stem Cell Research Guidelines; and the Research Integrity Committee, which considers allegations of non-compliance with Tri-Council policies.

Important achievements of the Ethics Office include:

• publishing Guidelines for Health Research Involving Aboriginal Peoples (2007), which informed Chapter 9 of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS)

• providing major input into the TCPS 2nd Edition in areas of health research

• influencing and contributing to the development of the Tri-Council process for addressing allegations of non-compliance with Tri-Council policies (2009)

• developing Best Practices for Research Involving Children and Adolescents (fall 2010); and an ethical framework for Partnerships with the Private Sector (fall 2010)

Figure 21: Number and value of ethics grants

Figure 21 long description

Through its strategic funding envelope of $2 million per year (which supplements the support available through CIHR's open funding competitions), the Ethics Office has been building capacity and supporting the existing research community. Figure 21 shows that CIHR now invests more than $6 million per year in 75 ethics-related grants. A further $1 million supports 33 training and salary awards.

A first Ethics strategic plan for 2010–2015 was developed in alignment with the CIHR Roadmap.

Evaluation

"End-of-grant reports provide an important mechanism in accumulating data on achievements that can be used for future evaluations. There are standard metrics in all (research) settings and more effort needs to be invested in ensuring that these are collected and analyzed to plot the relative success of the organization. This process needs to be addressed immediately so that information is available to assess CIHR objectively on its performance."

Resources and expertise for program evaluation have increased. CIHR has adopted a modified "payback" framework for capturing the value of investments in health research, similar to that proposed by the Canadian Academies of Health Sciences⁴² and focusing on advancing knowledge, research capacity building, informing decision making, health impacts and broad economic and social impacts. A five-year rolling evaluation plan is published each year.⁴³ Programs evaluated to date include the Training Programs, Canada Graduate Scholarships and Networks of Centres of Excellence (the latter two in collaboration with the other granting agencies). Studies on the outcomes from Open Operating Grants and Salary programs are in progress. The institutes have evaluated many of their most important research initiatives and this information is found in their individual reports.

A Research Reporting System captures information on the outputs and outcomes from all CIHR-funded research within 18 months of the end of the funding period.

Communications

"Communication remains an important and challenging activity for the CIHR, particularly the range of potential audiences, including funding partners, provincial and federal governments, universities, health researchers, international agencies and the citizens of Canada. CIHR management needs to consider creative approaches to the utilization of a wide range of communication sources and resources including effective use of electronic and web-based dissemination, and should continue to improve its communication with key stakeholders."

Communications and Public Outreach targets the media through press releases, expert alerts, ministerial announcements, a monthly e-newsletter to journalists and short profiles about CIHR-funded researchers. There has been an eight-fold increase in the number of media mentions of CIHR since the 2006 IRP report: from 561 in 2005–2006 to 4,363 in 2009–2010. To raise CIHR's profile among journalists and promote excellence in Canadian health journalism, the CIHR Journalism Awards and journalist workshops were instituted. CIHR regularly communicates the results and impacts of CIHR investments in health research with Members of Parliament. Each fall, CIHR holds the Canadian Health Research Awards, recognizing health research excellence. This event receives widespread publicity. CIHR engages members of the public directly through Cafés Scientifiques – informal interactions between the public and experts on a health issue, held at a café, pub or restaurant. CIHR held 104 Cafés across the country in 2009.

To connect health researchers with youth, CIHR developed its Synapse program⁴⁴ with the result that in 2008–2009, 5,300 CIHR mentors devoted 27,300 hours of their time to educate 112,800 Canadian youth about the merits of science and health research. CIHR's successful social media presence has expanded in the past year, with English and French Facebook pages⁴⁵ that already have more than 40,000 fans. In December 2008, CIHR launched a fully redesigned website with client-centric information architecture, and a consistent presentation of the institutes, each of which publishes newsletters about research opportunities and achievements that are of special interest to its research and partner community.

Canada's research landscape

"A major outstanding challenge for the CIHR and health research in Canada is the apparent lack of co-ordination at the federal and provincial levels of the many different types and sources for funding for different aspects of health research. Support for infrastructure and research posts are welcome but must be aligned with the operating grants that are necessary to keep the research enterprise running."

Since the first International Review, all federal research agencies, including CIHR, have strengthened their collaboration. This collaboration operates at multiple levels, including joint programs, administrative structures and funding policies. Presidents of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, CIHR, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation meet every three to six weeks to discuss issues of common concern, advance joint initiatives and explore strategic issues. Vice-presidents also meet on a regular basis to follow up on issues raised by the presidents, as well as to initiate and contribute to collaborative activities. An example of the outcomes of such meetings is the Institute of Population and Public Health-led International Research Initiative on Adaptation to Climate Change,⁴⁶ which also involves the International Development Research Centre, and supports the formation of multinational teams from Canada and low- and middle-income countries.

In addition, CIHR has strengthened its ties with the National Research Council (NRC) and Genome Canada. In 2008, CIHR and Genome Canada initiated major national and international collaborations such as the Canada–California partnership on Cancer Stem Cells (see below) and, more recently, a partnered program called Advancing Technology Innovation through Discovery that links next-generation sequencing technologies with gene discovery projects on childhood diseases.

Despite this broadened dialogue, the complex balance of funding among highly qualified personnel, infrastructure and maintenance and operating support – an issue that largely lies with budgetary decisions by the federal government – has remained a challenge.

Date modified:

2011-08-02