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Patients' needs should guide research: expert

Special Correspondent

"In many countries, a lot of money is wasted on irrelevant research"

VELLORE: "Some ways in which we need to try harder to do more good than harm in health care." This was the theme on which British health services researcher Iain Chalmers spoke here on Friday.

Sir Chalmers said scarce resources were wasted on health care that was not effective and might even be harmful, while effective forms of care were under-utilised. This was because those making decisions — patients, policy-makers and healthcare professionals — need high quality information on what treatments worked. Unfortunately, much of the information available was also of poor quality.

"What are the responsibilities of clinicians, health service managers and policy-makers when there are uncertainties about the effects of interventions? Should we brush it under the carpet," he posed these questions to the audience, comprising doctors of the Christian Medical College Hospital.

Sir Chalmers, coordinator of the James Lind Alliance, a coalition of organisations representing patients and clinicians collaborating to identify and confront important uncertainties about the effects of treatments, said one of the objectives of the James Lind Initiative (JLI), which he founded in 2002, was to increase the focus of the therapeutic research agenda on the searching questions of the patients. "The academics should involve the patients and the public, to a greater extent, in setting and implementing the research agenda."

Irrelevant research

Later, he told presspersons that in the United Kingdom and many other countries, a lot of money was wasted on irrelevant research, owing to lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, which made money through drugs that controlled the symptoms but did not cure the disease. "As a tax-paying citizen, I feel the resources I contributed to the Government should be used for the benefit of the patients and not the share-holders of pharmaceutical companies. As a doctor, I am responsible to the patient and not to the share-holders in the drug industry."

The JLI seeks to answer the questions of the patients through a telephone-answering service. "We are trying to get the patients' and clinicians' organisations to come together to achieve this objective."

Thanks to his two-year stint in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza strip, Sir Chalmers morphed from a clinician specialising in obstetrics and child health into a full-time health services researcher after training at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the London School of Economics.

At the refugee camp, he was frustrated at the lack of readily available and reliable information on the effects of healthcare interventions. Because of this, he felt, many of his patients suffered unnecessarily.

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