Multi-purpose medical centre a first

The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland has opened a £10 million research facility on the grounds of Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. The Education and Research Centre is a centre "for patient-oriented research," explains Dr Dermot Kenny, director of the Clinical Research Centre, which forms part of the ERC.

"It is the first of its kind here. It is a fantastic development for the country." The ERC has been designed so as to link together three strands: medical research, clinical practice and the education of doctors, he said.

The aims are to bring research advances through as quickly as possible into patient treatments; to give practitioners immediate access to research teams; and to help keep medical students at the forefront of research.

"If a physician has a Ph. D or basic researcher beside him it can stimulate the research of the scientist and vice-versa," Dr Kenny says.

"If you have medical students who are aware of how research is done it will keep them at the cutting edge. By definition, you get state-of-the-art and optimal care." The structure of the three-storey, 46,000 sq ft facility reflects this approach," he says.

The Clinical Research Centre is on the ground floor and has consulting rooms, outpatients, patient beds, a procedures room and a "negative pressure" room for advanced gene-therapy treatments when these come on stream.

The ERC's research labs are also on the ground floor so there will be a ready exchange between physicians and researchers. Student lecture theatres and tutorial rooms are on the first floor along with a teaching laboratory and a "crisis management centre" for education in crisis medical situations.

The second floor will house microbiology, serology, pathology and histopathology labs, which will be moved across from the RCSI in St Stephen's Green. Funding for the ERC, which was opened officially last Saturday, has come via Cycle, one of the Government's Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions, from college funds and also donations from companies and individuals.

The land has been leased from Beaumont Hospital. Its location so close to the teaching hospital is expected to consolidate the existing links between Beaumont and the RCSI, which sends many of its student doctors there for training. The ERC itself will employ 250, and about 150 of these will be directly involved in research. Of that number, about 50 will be full-time hospital and college staff and 100 will be post-doctoral researchers.

"The college a few years ago decided it would invest heavily in research. Our research translates into patient care," Dr Kenny says. This was embodied in the "bench to bedside approach", with new treatments from the lab moving quickly through to the patient. Its aim, he added, would be to bring about constant improvements in clinical practice. If the success rate of a given procedure was taken to be say 75 per cent, the goal would be to raise this to 80 per cent or 85 per cent.