Tuesday, May 18, 2010

National Health Research Policy India 2010 - Comments and issue

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ICMR Research Policy – Draft and points to be consider
Recently Department of Health Research has drafted National Health Research Policy and put on ICMR web page for comments and inputs. The last date for comments and inputs is 31st May 2010. Many people must read and commented to given mail id.
I like to take some issues for discussion and positive criticism.
First I must thank to whole department of Health research who took great pain to develop very good national policy. It has covered wide area of research and put emphasis on inter-sectoral research and evidence based research. This is the need of hour to work on evidence based research. They have rightly put examples of evidence based national programme which are developed and working at present. The government is making lots of efforts for research and also wants to increase research funding. They could not able to stop to write that non of health research from India has merited consideration by the Nobel Committee.
They have rightly put the constrains for health research. Major one are policy level constrain, lack of research culture, lack of co-ordination, lack of research capacity building, weakness in medical education about research and no clear research career.
The department wants to develop National Health research System in country, which will be managed by National Health Research Management Forum. Like five year plan, the forum will develop priority areas for five year.
Key policy area are
1. Policy aims to generate the evidence based for health system and services with focus on equity and poverty reduction
2. Develop linkage between health research and national health programme (need of hour)
3. Translation research to product (Great thought)
4. Encourage the fundamental health research in Physiology, Biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, pathology, molecular sciences and cell science.
5. Development of priority setting guide for country
6. Involvement of profit and non-profit organization for health research (Excellent involvement)
7. Global knowledge for local action
8. Management of global resources for optimum utilization and minimum duplication
9. Involvement of social science, anthropology, economics and education in health research
10. Optimum harmonization of National policies and inter sectoral collaboration.
Really big thinking, how much executable will need to see???
My observation is that the draft policy has given India’s future health challenges in Annexure 1, but I surprised that all data which are given in draft are very old maximum till 2005. I could not understand why the big document dose not has recent data of 2009 or 2010? For example the data for suicide are presented from National crime record bureau (1993-2003). What happened to bureau after 2003? We don’t have that data. Just surprised? Second example we have cancer registry programme at national programme, still the draft has given data for 2004. I am not understanding why? Just big talk and making policy on paper is ok. Need to think?
More comments are welcome and we must expect that at the end of 31st March ICMR will put number of comments received on draft and improvement.
Please send your inputs to lalitkant@icmr.org.in direct before 31st May 2010

Dr. Niraj Pandit

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1 comment:

tushar said...

Whenever you submitt proposal to ICMR they reject it and later on they approve with their name as principal investigator and little modifications. ICMR should not have permisssion to conduct research itself but its performance should be measured by how many good proposals it sanctioned