CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health - Institute Advisory Board Meeting Highlights

September 17-18, 2003

A welcome reception for new IAB members in attendance, Gilles Paradis and Jason Robert, followed by a dinner, was held on the evening of September 17th at the Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto.  This event provided an opportunity for new IAB members to become better acquainted with existing IAB members and IPPH staff.

Some of the Institute Advisory Board's key discussions at this meeting included:

Strategic Competition Issues

Mark Bisby joined the meeting by teleconference to discuss issues raised by the IAB related to strategic competitions, such as the need to continuously evaluate and improve peer review and strategic competition processes, such as timelines.  The IAB Chair, Jean-Yves Savoie, will be attending the upcoming annual CIHR Peer Review Committee Chairs and Scientific Officers meeting in Ottawa in early October where he intends to raise the issues that arose from these discussions, such as new approaches to dealing with wide discrepancies in scoring from one reviewer to another and bringing younger researchers to peer review panels to learn from the experience and help them to write better grants.

Summer Institute 2003

Gilles Paradis reported on the 2003 Summer Institute hosted by the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec's Population Health Research Network in collaboration with IPPH and CIHR's Institute of Health Services and Policy Research. Discussion focused primarily on recommendations for improvements for the 2004 Summer Institute, which will be held in B.C. and organized by local research leaders. The IAB reiterated its support of the summer institute concept as an excellent way for IPPH to invest in building capacity for interdisciplinary health research.

Institute Evaluation

Since the last IAB meeting, the Institute Evaluation Steering Committee that includes IPPH representation undertook a consultation exercise with all 13 Institutes and representatives from the four CIHR portfolios. The purpose of this exercise was to: produce a template that Institutes can use for developing Institute-specific frameworks; capture a common set of Institute-level performance indicators; realize economies of scale for framework development and some measurement and evaluation work; and enable coordinated evaluation of multi-institute initiatives.  This consultation produced a set of early and medium term priority indicators that should be common to all Institutes.  The list of core indicators (10-15 in total) will be finalized in the coming weeks and presented for approval by the Institutes.  Five additional Institute-specific indicators will complement this core list. 

Progress Achieved in Relation to IPPH Strategic Plan:

Capacity Building 

• An update on the Future of Public Health in Canada paper, Think Tank Proceedings and recently formed Coalition for Public Health  was presented. Following the Calgary Think Tank, a decision was made to establish a Canadian Coalition for Public Health in the 21st century chaired by David-Butler Jones and Elinor Wilson with secretariat support from the Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA). This group seeks to act on the recommendations that arose at the Calgary meeting and in IPPH's report on the Future of Public Health in Canada. 
• The Public Health and Health Care System Preparedness and Response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS): Evaluation and Lessons Learned RFA will be peer reviewed within the next few months. IAB members were encouraged to provide suggestions of peer reviewers to sit on the peer review committee.

Impacts of Physical and Social Environments on Health

• IPPH will support six Centres for Research Development to build population and public health research capacity across Canada within its priority research theme, understanding and addressing the impacts of physical and social environments on health.

Health Disparities

• IPPH is participating in an upcoming International Think Tank on Reducing Health Disparities and Promoting Equity of Vulnerable Populations.
• Peer review of the Health Disparities RFA will take place in December 2003.

Global Health

• A Global Health Coalition Retreat was organized to discuss the coalition's purpose, governance and management, and lessons learned to date.  

• IAB members were provided with a copy of the final version of the Global Health Research Pilot Project RFA that was launched earlier in the summer and will be peer reviewed early in 2004.

Gene-Environment Interactions

• John Frank is in the process of drafting a background document that will outline the vision and scientific issues related to the design of a multigenerational cohort study and inform discussions at a by invitation only March 2004 workshop of national and international experts.

Taking Stock of Current Investments and Exploring Opportunities for 2004-05 and beyond

An update on IPPH's current investments and strategic funding commitments was presented. This provided context for the subsequent discussion focused on identifying future investment opportunities to address PPH research gaps.  Ideas for future initiatives included smaller scale projects, such as potentially "high risk" initiatives that do not necessarily fit within traditional peer review committee mandates; and research to study the relationship between evaluation research projects aimed at evaluating interventions and innovation in the public health system.  It was also recommended that IPPH attempt to assess absorptive capacity for new RFAs in the research community prior to launching additional RFAs, and that the Institute consider investing in the other Institutes' upcoming RFAs that speak to these priorities and the CIHR Knowledge Translation (KT) RFA that will be launched in December 2003, as appropriate.

Strengthening the Population and Public Health (PPH) Network

The IAB discussed building a population and public health network including the rationale, and potential goals and challenges of this undertaking, as well as a proposed process for moving it forward. The IAB members expressed strong support for this initiative and discussion focused on their role as IPPH/PPH ambassadors within the network, as well as potential next steps, including an environmental scan of existing similar networks and identifying priority areas for network development.  A suggestion was made that strengthening the Institute's relationship with IPPH funded and IPPH-affiliated initiatives, such as the Training Initiatives and Centres for Research Development, could be a potential first step towards building a PPH network. 

CIHR Draft Strategic Plan

IAB members were provided with a copy of CIHR's draft strategic plan "Blueprint 2007" and encouraged to provide feedback on this consultation document.

Future Strategic Planning Opportunities

IAB members supported the idea of holding a second IPPH IAB retreat sometime in 2004 to review the institute's strategic priorities.

Future IAB Meeting (s)

The next IAB meeting was scheduled for January 28- 29, 2004 in Toronto. A suggestion was made that leaders of a few IPPH sponsored Training Initiatives be invited to the next IAB meeting to participate in a panel discussion and dialogue at the pre-meeting dinner aimed at exploring ways in which IPPH can better support its important work in training the next generation of researchers in a range of population health research topic areas. The IAB members were very supportive of this suggestion and action will be taken to proceed with this invitation.

Other Discussions

• IPPH's Annual report will be available in English and French later this Fall on the CIHR-IPPH website.  A limited number of copies will be printed.

• Jason Robert is the new Ethics designate from IPPH who will represent the Institute on the cross-CIHR Ethics Advisory Committee. CIHR KT is considering the development of a similar cross -CIHR advisory group comprised of IAB members with expertise in knowledge translation/exchange.