At the official opening of the Usher Building in Edinburgh Bioquarter on Thursday the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus accepted the first Edinburgh Prize for Global Health Impact on behalf of the organisation.
The prize recognises the organisation’s programme during the last half century to provide life-saving vaccines for children all over the world. The Director General was emphatic in his view of the programme’s impact. He said: “Since 1974, 154 million lives were saved. So vaccine works, vaccine helps children survive. And that is actually what this prize from the University of Edinburgh is saying and the WHO has contributed significantly to this.”
Dr Tedros officially opened the £50 million plus building constructed with funding from The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal – the £1.5 billion deal funded by both the UK and the Scottish Governments and which involves six local authorities in the area. Funding also came from The Wolfson Foundation.
This building is part of the Data-Driven Innovation part of the City Region Deal and is one of six hubs supported by the initiative. The building is a co-location hub where more than 900 researchers and scientists will work alongside health and social care providers and industry leaders to use data to provide healthcare solutions.
Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh said that with his background as a medical doctor he does have some understanding of the work to be carried out in the Usher Building. He said: “I’m no longer an active researcher, but the ethos of the building is very multidisciplinary. It’s the product of a collaboration between the two governments in Westminster and Holyrood in terms of funding, and also the Wolfson Foundation, which is also a very important contributor. But the work itself is very collaborative and across disciplines, across areas and subjects, and also across nations.
Sir Peter explained that what the research will provide is facts and data. He cited the example of NHS waiting lists which were “already under strain prior to the pandemic”. He said: “it’s not as if the pandemic caused all the problems, but what the pandemic did is it brought the problems of the pandemic, but it also put everything else into second place, if you like. So there was then a backlog built up, and we now have this extraordinary number of people on NHS waiting lists in Scotland and in the rest of the UK, with the NHS struggling to keep up. So researchers here will are providing facts and that is really useful for governments to understand where the priorities are. Good policy is formed from good data and good data is formed from multidisciplinary collaborations.”
The Rt Hon Ian Murray explained that he is an alumnus of the University of Edinburgh and that it was especially good to be at the opening of the new building. He explained that the UK Government involvement in the City Region Deal had contributed significantly towards the building with a contribution of £48.5 million. He said: “The real reason for that kind of contribution was to provide buildings like this that can innovate, provide us with the research and development of the future, to bring financiers, partners, institutions, organisations, businesses and researchers all together to collaborate under one roof, to give us that healthcare of the future.”
WHO funding
Asked about the ongoing challenged of funding the WHO, (In May the WHO reduced its management team and scaled back its operations after the United States announced it was leaving the agency and cutting its financial support leading to a 21% cut in the organisation’s budget), Dr Tedros said that they had “seen it coming” in 2017 when they started the transformation of the WHO. He said: “The major risk we identified was reliance on a few traditional donors – because if any one of them reduces their funding, the same situation could happen, and the organisation cannot absorb it.
“Not only that, when you rely on only a few traditional donors that also can affect your independence. So at that time, we said we have to broaden our donor base, and that can help us get flexible funding, long term funding. At the same time, it will make WHO more independent, because we rely on almost all 194 countries.
“Our funding started to be broadened out, and it’s helping us to minimise the pain due to the current crisis. The contribution that was provided during the last two to three years is helping us to save jobs. We are seeing this as an opportunity. It’s a crisis but as an opportunity we will emerge better.”
In this imposing building looking down on the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh there is pioneering work taking place with researchers leveraging artificial intelligence to improve surgical outcomes and scientists exploring diagnostic potential through routine retina imaging.
