Private hospitals and clinical laboratories have invested in the creation of teaching and research institutes for carrying out projects in the medical area. At the beginning of December, the Fleury Diagnostic Medicine Center and the Syrio-Lebanese Hospital joined this group, which already had the Albert Einstein Israeli Hospital as its pioneer member.The Fleury Institute was created with the objective of expanding research and actions in education and social responsibility. With 250 physicians on its staff, the Fleury works with 23 researchers in medicine. There were, at the end of 2003, a mere 15 of them in charge of 19 in-house projects, 26 in cooperation with universities, and 19 theses being prepared in whole or in part in the technical area of the laboratory.
The institute intends to strengthen the already existing partnerships between the laboratory and several research centers, like the University of São Paulo (USP) and the São Paulo State University (Unesp), and to establish new agreements. The expectation is also to increase the range of action of the programs for on-going education, improvement, and specialization, which the laboratory has been running for years, giving priority to its higher level personnel. “We also intend to offer postgraduate courses, which, in the first moment at least, will be carried out at the partner universities”, says Rendrik Franco, one of the directors of the institute.
According to Franco, the laboratory will invest R$ 3 million a year in the institute, without taking into consideration the budget that, for some years now, it has been setting aside for research. “These funds will be directed mainly towards the areas of education and social responsibility”, he observes. With this venture, the Fleury also intends to increase its investments in the publication of scientific texts. “We have already launched various manuals, and now we want to publish periodicals and books”, Franco comments. He explains that the Fleury’s initiatives in the development of products and processes and in technological innovation have grown a lot in the last ten years. “Recently, we realized that much of this knowledge already accumulated and applied is liable to intellectual property registration”, he says.
Critical mass
At the beginning of December, the Syrio-Lebanese Hospital, from São Paulo, inaugurated a Teaching and Research Institute, with investments of R$ 20 million. The institute is waiting for authorization from the Ministry of Education to act as an institute of higher education, and it will shortly be offering lato senso postgraduate courses, with medical residence, specialization, improvement and attachments in various specialties, such as pain studies, oncology and video surgery. “The idea is to form critical mass in experimental and clinical research, to offer later stricto senso master’s studies as well”, says Roberto de Queiroz Padilha, the institute’s executive-director.
The Syrio-Lebanese Hospital’s Institute boasts six training centers, with infrastructure for research, teaching, and the practice of video surgery, microsurgery, arthroscopy, critical incident simulation, prostate brachytherapy and cardiovascular emergencies. It will also carry on with the work of the Syrio-Lebanese’s Studies and Researches Center, which since 1978 has been promoting further education for doctors and other health professionals, holding day events, symposiums, congresses and scientific meetings about the most varied themes, with the highlight on intensive therapy. “It will now be possible, from our amphitheaters, to follow any procedure from the operating rooms of the hospital and from the training centers”, Padilha observes.
The pioneer, the Albert Einstein Hospital’s Teaching and Research Institute, which was born, formally, in 1998, now offers graduation courses in nursing and lato senso postgraduate courses in several areas of medicine. “Apart from the regular programs, we offer today over 80 update courses”, says Carlos Alberto Moreira Filho, the institute’s coordinator. “Research is a strategic activity for the hospital”, he comments. The Albert Einstein Institute maintains collaboration agreements with several universities in Brazil and abroad – USP, São Paulo Medical School and the Cleveland Clinic are a few examples of partners. With an initial investment of about R$ 10 million, it generated R$ 12 million in income in 2003 and forecasts 25% growth in 2004. It attracted almost 6,000 pupils in 2003.
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