In 2006, the British Society for Dental Research (BSDR) commissioned a position paper on oral and dental research within the United Kingdom which would serve as a foundation and a framework for a national plan for oral and dental research. This paper was written by Iain Chapple, Paula Farthing, David Williams and Michael Curtis in 2006 and updated in December 2007.
According to this strategic review, the UK dental school research income in the period 2000-2004 was less than 2% of medical schools research income. Knowing that the NHS spend on dental care was about 5% of the total NHS healthcare spend, this indicates that dental research was under funded compared to medical research.
The majority of dental research funding was provided by UK government, industry and charities over this five-year period. Funding from research councils, EU and other sources constituted up to one third of the overall funding per year. It is interesting that most of the charitable funding came from the Wellcome Trust since there is no national charitable source dedicated to oral research.
The best financed research in UK dental schools has been basic with more than two thirds of awarded grants. Less than one third of grants was awarded for clinical research in dental schools. These data are based on grants awarded between 2000 and 2005 by the Medical Research Council (cca. £6m), Wellcome Trust (£8.68m), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (£cca. 1.2 m) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (£520k). The percentage of dental materials research funding has not been reported in this position paper.
Some of the identified reasons for under funding dental research in UK dental schools include the lack of representation on review panels of research councils and major charities, the absence of a national charitable source for funding oral research and underscoring grant proposals by internal panels in spite of high scores by external expert reviewers.
Four priority areas have been proposed in this position paper:
- Establishing a dedicated Oral and Dental Research Charity
- Better representation for oral and dental research on review panels
- Developing critical mass through nationally-coordinated research consortia and
- Encouraging inter-school collaboration.
No comments:
Post a Comment