Medical and health sciences
Below you will find SWOT analyses of the different fields of medical and health sciences in Finland. The analyses have been compiled by discipline-specific groups of researchers. The development proposals have been outlined by the Academy’s Research Councils. At the end of each section, you will find links to bibliometric data on that specific field as well as PDF versions of the material for printing.
Biomedicine | Clinical medicine | Dental sciences | Nursing science and health services research | Nutrition | Pharmacy | Public health research, environmental health and occupational health | Sport sciences | Vetenary sciences
Biomedicine: SWOT analysis and development proposals
Biomedicine: Strengths
- Population base favourable to research
- Large population cohorts, extensive sample collections at hospitals
- Opportunities for systematic materials analysis using high-throughput methods
- Graduate school systems, career advancement models for researchers (tenure-track system)
- Increasingly international research
- International evaluation in funding for research projects
Biomedicine: Weaknesses
- Modest core funding compared to successful research-intensive countries elsewhere in Europe
- Lack of long-term funding
- Underdeveloped practices and funding opportunities that could support cooperation between business companies and academic research teams; lack of necessary support at universities for refining research results within Finland
- Decrease in number of clinical researchers
Biomedicine: Opportunities
- Systematic development of infrastructures; easier application for EU funding by Finnish researchers following successful integration into ESFRI (European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures) projects
- Good framework conditions for competitive and publicly approved, extensive research using high-throughput methods and unique background material following successful biobank reform and new Act on the Medical Use of Human Organs and Tissues
- Constant need for expertise in bioinformatics; solid foundation thanks to good Finnish traditions in computer science
Biomedicine: Threats
- Basic research seen as expense instead of investment
- Underutilisation of valuable research data, unless working legislation on biobanks is adopted
- Increasingly costly methods used in omics-level analysis; data transferred elsewhere if Finland cannot afford analysing them
- Decrease in international evaluation in various research projects due to autonomous status of universities
- How does the new Universities Act reflect the researchers’ viewpoints?
- Insufficient systematic analysis of large datasets using high-throughput methods
- Future lack of funding for graduate school systems
Biomedicine: Development proposals
- It must be ensured that Finland, as a member country, will commit to the implementation stage of ESFRI infrastructure projects.
- It must be guaranteed that the funding for bottom-up research projects that are based on international peer review will continue to be a significant funding instrument of the Academy of Finland.
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Clinical medicine: SWOT analysis and development proposals
Clinical medicine: Strengths
- Quality and quantity of research
- Reliability and scope of Finnish registers and other data; patients willing to participate in research; good structure of service delivery system in healthcare
- Active collaboration between research groups
- Good research infrastructure
Clinical medicine: Weaknesses
- Substantive funding cuts in recent years
- Research environments increasingly negative towards following major reforms
- Decreased appreciation of research at both hospitals and universities
- Professors’ time increasingly having to be spent on administrative tasks
- Lack of basic research methods in clinical research
Clinical medicine: Opportunities
- Further raising the level of research through international networking
- Increasing translational and transformative research
- Creating large-scale research groups around specific research topics
- Developing the clinical research career
- Radical reforms such as financing university hospitals with state funds
Clinical medicine: Threats
- Clinical research being neglected in funding: special state subsidies for research from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, funding from the Academy of Finland
- Decrease in the number of full-time professor positions
- Inadequate research preconditions for part-time professorships that are mainly filled based on clinical activity
- Drop in the number of senior researchers reaching the very top of their field
Clinical medicine: Development proposals
- The size of clinical research groups should be increased to reach critical mass. This should be done by stepping up research efforts in particular after the dissertation stage.
- The Finnish Government must ramp up its investment in clinical research and appropriations by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health for university-level research should be doubled in the next three-year term, in order for Finnish clinical research to reinforce its position internationally.
- The Academy of Finland’s funding for clinical researchers must be a permanent fixture.
- A tenure-track system for clinical researchers must be introduced. In addition, there should be clear incentives for clinical research conducted at university hospitals.
- University hospitals should be provided with improved preconditions for a parallel system of research and clinical work by establishing posts that enable the combination of both types of work.
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Dental science: SWOT analysis and development proposals
Dental science: Strengths
- Finnish research in dental science at the international cutting edge, but very few top performers
- Wide scope of research in Finland, each specialty with high-level starting points
- Good solidarity between research units
- Researchers forced to advance their competence following policies of the 1990s that cut the training resources available for dental science; only the best researchers remain
Dental science: Weaknesses
- Age structure
- Lack of young researchers, team leaders and teachers
- Quality of education suffers from fixed-term research funding, having to repeatedly apply for funding; lack of earmarked funding
- Effects of study environment: waning interest in research among students after the preclinical stage (e.g. in Helsinki) due to conflicts between research-based university lectures and clinical training at health centres*
- Poor application of latest research results in clinical work and training
- Underutilisation of experts without dentist’s training in research and education; experts also ignored in filling research posts in dental science
- Many fields of dental science dependent on a single person
Dental science: Opportunities
- Popularity: students interested in studying dental science
- Increased competition
- Standardising education in different training units
- Performance-based funding: earmarked funding for merited researchers
- Recruiting merited academics without dentist’s training to dental science research and training posts at universities
Dental science: Threats
- Discontinuation of graduate school system
- Salary policy: university salaries cannot compete with salaries in the private healthcare sector; discrepancy also within universities, for example, in the salaries of clinical teachers and lecturers with a doctoral degree in dental science
- Translational research fading away
- Difficulties in applying for research permits for clinical research in Europe (outside the EU)
- Only 1 per cent of dental science graduates choose to do research; greater critical mass needed to seek out top talents*
- Plans on discontinuing the posts of laboratory supervisor
* A threat is posed by the complete isolation of clinical work from academia as responsibility for dental specialist education transfers to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and responsibility for Bachelor’s-level education increasingly transfers to health centres. If this were the case, there would not be enough critical mass for comprehensive university education in dental science based on academic research.
Dental science: Development proposals
- A graduate school/doctoral programme in dental science is an absolute prerequisite for the education of skilled academic researchers and teachers in Finland. At present, there is an urgent need for such experts. The current demand would require at least some 20 researcher/doctoral candidate positions, a minimum of five positions in each dental science training units. The positions should be distributed in open competition.
- The support for dental science research must be made long-term and the core funding must be permanent; departmental appropriations and earmarked funds for dental science research need to be brought back.
- Researchers who have recently earned their doctorate and postdoctoral researchers need to have access to 4–6-year, senior-level posts in dental science units.
- The recruitment of professors/research directors must also take into account and target high-level researchers who may not have a degree in dental science. This would strengthen and augment the translational character of applied research in dental science.
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Nursing science and health services research: SWOT analysis and development proposals
Nursing science and health services research:
Strengths
- Both disciplines have taken root
- Methodological diversity
- Good employment rate for doctoral graduates
- Good availability of high-quality register and survey data
Nursing science and health services research:
Weaknesses
- Priorities in funding, short-sightedness
- Small research groups
- Lack of suitable positions for international senior researchers
- Lack of postdoctoral researcher positions
- Poor international mobility among young researchers
- Fragmentary funding both in Finland and internationally
- Declining administrative support services
- Research resources partly transferred to development activities
Nursing science and health services research:
Opportunities
- New funding sources: special state subsidies for research (“EVO funding”), Tekes, the EU
- Changing structure and funding of the healthcare system
- Researcher training collaboration in Europe on the rise
- Good networking within doctoral programmes
- EU funding potentially increasing
Nursing science and health services research:
Threats
- Weakened position for basic research and long-term scientific research, shifting of focus to speedy investigations and development projects
- Crumbling of information systems and registers
- Diminished support from network community
Nursing science and health services research:
Development proposals
- As a result of growing costs and an increasing need for services, among other things, the healthcare system is teetering on the brink of a crisis, both in Finland and globally. This development has considerably increased the demand for research knowledge on the service delivery system. To satisfy this demand, universities should support the establishment of strong, multidisciplinary research groups in healthcare and nursing science.
- There is a growing need for researcher-trained experts not only in research operations but also in management, planning and development tasks as well as in education. Universities should therefore increase their training of researchers in nursing science and health services research.
- The utilisation of healthcare-related research knowledge in policy-making should be supported. In particular, national development projects targeting the service delivery system should be required to adopt a project review process that fulfils solid scientific criteria. A valid and sound review could strengthen the planning and implementation of such projects as well as improve their potential applicability.
- In many European countries, health services research and nursing science are still emerging fields. Efforts should be made to bolster international collaboration in these fields by improving European cooperation in research programmes and researcher training.
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Nutrition: SWOT analysis and
development proposals
The disciplines of nutrition and food sciences were evaluated in one joint workshop.
Nutrition: Strengths
- Acknowledged and recognised status of food sciences and nutrition
- High international regard for the discipline (c.f. good results in Academy of Finland’s evaluation of food sciences and related research, Publications of the Academy of Finland 2/06)
- Joint graduate school (ABS)
- Recognised high quality of research
- Multidisciplinarity
Nutrition: Weaknesses
- Challenging to maintain modern laboratory infrastructure (equipment) amid rapid methodological developments
- Constant need to update data in Finnish Food Composition Database
Nutrition: Opportunities
- Consortium between different actors
- National strategy for food sciences research
- International collaboration (Nordic countries (NordForsk), EU (joint programmes), China)
- Cooperation with business sector in both basic research and application (product) development
Nutrition: Threats
- Lack of long-range funding
- Future status of the network-based graduate school (ABS)
- Fields missing from the national classification of fields of science
Nutrition: Development proposals
- Nutrition is a small discipline, and the huge teaching responsibility of university staff, which takes away senior-level resources from research, is thus an essential hindrance to the progress of the discipline. In practice, Finnish universities do not have dedicated research posts in nutrition at all. Three Finnish universities host a chair in the field. Each of these universities would require one senior-level research post in nutrition that could also, where necessary, be used to provide support to postdoctoral researchers.
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Pharmacy: SWOT analysis and
development proposals
Pharmacy: Strengths
- Wide appeal of researcher training (even internationally)
- National networking rather than competition; profiling and supplementing expertise
- Cross-disciplinarity
- Many international connections
- Good international level of research in all subfields
- Good level of publication despite the young discipline
- Ability and will to regenerate
- Good balance between goals and results of and demand for doctoral training
- Good placement rate for doctoral graduates
- Good-quality basic training
- Excellent network of graduate schools (FinPharmaNet): will continue as a doctoral programme
- Good international mobility of basic-level students
- Good basic infrastructure
- (New) investments by universities thanks to write-offs
Pharmacy: Weaknesses
- Pharmacy not covered by the Strategic Centres of Science, Technology and Innovation
- Research funding highly dependent on Tekes
- Cumbersome and slow patenting, innovations ineffectively turned into products
- Not much domestic research in the pharmaceutical industry
- Field and research in the field not well known
- Funding for new fields of pharmacy
- Lack of Centres of Excellence, Academy Professors and FiDiPro Professors (Finland Distinguished Professor Programme)
- Little participation in translational research
- Opportunities for academic career advancement
- Mobility/cooperation between business companies and universities
- Domestic graduate students and postdoctoral researchers uninterested in researcher exchange
- Financing the costs of maintaining infrastructure
Pharmacy: Opportunities
- Participation in the preparation of EU research programmes
- Smaller, thematic Strategic Centres in addition to the existing large ones
- Focus for international pharmaceutical industry and society shifts to impact and cost-effectiveness of treatment
- International funding (Marie Curie, IMI, EU)
- Increasing entrepreneurialism
- Highlighting pharmaceutical expertise on forums in other fields
- Collaboration with Brazil and Russia
- Progress in international funding
- Several thematic “hot spots”
- Shift from a mere subject to a transdisciplinary field
- Pharmaceutical research moving away from individual molecules and towards more holistic treatment concepts
- Cooperation between hospital pharmacy and universities in the field of clinical pharmacy
- Good-quality doctoral candidates from abroad and with own funding
- Increasing the effectiveness of researcher training by shortening the duration
- Placement of doctoral graduates outside the field in national and international expert positions
- Making good use of graduate school courses in other countries
- Improved utilisation of networks such as Marie Curie
- More effective utilisation of CSC (IT Centre for Science)
- Taking advantage of ESFRI (European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures) infrastructures
- Stepping up the use of infrastructure core facilities supporting research
Pharmacy: Threats
- Unclear evaluation criteria for Tekes funding
- Decrease in government research funding
- High publication rate in emerging science nations (however: questionable quality, own publication series)
- Funding both trend-dependent and short-term
- Low appeal of postgraduate studies/academic career due to weak economic situation, for instance
- Funding for research abroad available, but no willingness
- Too much work and red tape in funding instruments (especially EU, international mobility)
- End of funding for Biocentre Finland (or corresponding)
- Expertise in specialities dependent on a single person (infrastructures)
Pharmacy: Development proposals
- A better understanding of the special characteristics of pharmaceutical research requires from the Academy of Finland a targeted evaluation in the final phase of the review of applications for Centre of Excellence, Academy Professor and FiDiPro funding. This targeted evaluation would involve merited researchers in the field of pharmacy acting as reviewers.
- The Academy of Finland should organise a joint scientific peer-review exercise together with the other Nordic countries or some other relevant countries (which has been in the works for some time now). The exercise should be used to analyse the field of pharmacy as to its international strengths and areas in need of development.
- Besides large Strategic Centres for Science, Technology and Innovation, Finland also needs smaller, theme-based centres, for example collaborative inter-university projects in different fields of pharmacy or clear-cut translational projects combining pharmacy and other fields of health sciences. These projects could be financed through corporate funding and project-based funding from the Ministry of Employment and the Economy.
- The progress of research is highly dependent on the strengthening and maintenance of infrastructures.
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Public health research, environmental health and occupational health:
SWOT analysis and development proposals
Public health research, environmental health
and occupational health: Strengths
- Extensive registers and data combined with a population willing to participate in studies
- Strong research tradition and solid expertise in epidemiology
- Combining different databases and biological samples (i.e. different registers) possible
- Easier to cross boundaries between science and research fields, favourable attitude to multidisciplinary research
- Social policy able to account for public health perspectives
Public health research, environmental health
and occupational health: Weaknesses
- Lack of “big picture” thinking and strategic vision for future directions
- Data infrastructures poorly taken into consideration in infrastructure funding; no national organisation of maintenance financing for long-term monitoring registers
- Rigid administrative machinery, permit procedures for combining different registers
- Finland strategically a rather inflexible country (compared to other OECD countries), which reflects poorly on the research: suffers from tunnel vision, has limited resources and is unable to make collective decisions, if objective is to improve the status of public health
Public health research, environmental health
and occupational health: Opportunities
- Finland’s potential of increasing its significance as a model country for public health research
- Increasing Nordic collaboration
- Better facilitation of multidisciplinary research; boldly acknowledging new initiatives and perspectives
- Integrating registers with the healthcare system so that healthcare-related information systems could directly be utilised in studies, for example to gather a sufficient amount of patient data
- Research investment in ageing, functional capacity and working capacity; greater investments in health behaviour and influence through knowledge; special characteristics of public health research that are easy to take into consideration in science policy and resource allocation; huge application value for results, health promotion/prevention politically significant
Public health research, environmental health
and occupational health: Threats
- Falling behind international development and becoming a historical marginal actor
- Loss of collected research data as competition for funding becomes fiercer
- Inability to demonstrate the impact of public health research due to weak arguments for its significance
- Lack of courage to take new initiatives, continuing on with old research traditions with no big picture of the research field in a national context; research concentrated to areas to which it is easy to attract external research funds
- Diminishing appeal of research careers, lack of researchers with a medical (physician’s) background, discontinuation of the successful doctoral programme in public health (DPPH) as a result of the reorganisation of graduate school funding
Public health research, environmental health
and occupational health: Development
proposals
- In distributing infrastructure funding, the maintenance of Finnish monitoring data should be considered parallel to other infrastructures (equipment). In other words, support should be available for both data and equipment infrastructure. This would apply both to Academy funding and to funding by other sources. As data infrastructures require more constant maintenance, the funding amounts should, where necessary, be quite small at the annual level, but long-term nonetheless (5–7 yrs). The equipment used for research is often a large and expensive non-recurrent investment. Funding models and criteria should therefore take into account different needs.
- Register-based research should be supported by, for instance, appointing a rapporteur or working group to identify the obstacles to good register research in Finland and by developing the activity of the Finnish Information Centre for Register Research. The research permit process should be simplified so that permits can be applied for from one single authority. In accordance with the Government Programme, efforts should be made to promote the free use of knowledge and data collected with public funds. Within public health research, this will at least involve medical and other data gathered by Statistics Finland, the Institute for Health and Welfare and the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.
- Nordic collaboration should be developed into a significant forum for funding cooperation. There is great potential in this area, since the Nordic countries have similar infrastructure and registers, extensive population data and long-standing traditions and topics in public health. The Nordic countries also partly share the same genetic make-up. Nordic collaboration in public health and environmental health (population surveys, the combined effects of environmental factors and the genome) should also be emphasised in international research cooperation and joint funding with countries in Asia.
- The significance of the discipline as a basis for policy-making should be highlighted. The impact of research results should be improved, for instance, in prevention, in health promotion and in solving the problems of the ageing population.
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Sport sciences: SWOT analysis and development proposals
This SWOT analysis is based on the international evaluation of sport sciences in the Nordic countries in 2006–2010 (Publications of the Academy of Finland 1/12), which was coordinated by the Academy of Finland, and on the evaluation of research activities 2005–2009 (University of Jyväskylä 2011) by the University of Jyväskylä (UJ).
Sport sciences: Strengths
- Exceptionally strong national cooperation between research groups and institutes, partly thanks to the joint researcher training location (the UJ only Finnish university providing higher education in sport sciences)
- Much interdisciplinary collaboration, with a large amount of interest and preparedness
- International esteem, extensive international networks
- Productive and sold research
- Strong research traditions of experimental and prospective observation
- Access to extensive registers and other data, sufficient research infrastructure
- Population willing to participate in studies
- Good social impact
Sport sciences: Weaknesses
- Many relatively small units spread out across the country
- No or sporadic links to medicine; little orientation towards nutritional science
- Insufficient population base in terms of forming clinical research groups, different studies compete for the same subjects
- Lack of senior researchers in sport history and sociology
- Research funding too dependent on the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture
- Low international publication rates in sport-related behavioural and social sciences
Sport sciences: Opportunities
- Capacity to raise the quality and quantity of top-level research thanks to high-quality research infrastructure and well-trained and motivated researchers
- Increased willingness among the population to participate in studies thanks to good reputation of sport sciences research and widely positive attitudes to physical exercise
- Opportunity to establish a high-level and large-scale biobank and further increase national research collaboration
- Wide-ranging research into health effects of physical exercise possible thanks to extensive health registers
- Increasing in particular Nordic collaboration, but also other international cooperation
- Good opportunities to increase international research funding
- Growing corporate funding
- Opportunities for research with societal impact and great application value
- Possible new initiatives in economics, management studies and political studies, for instance
Sport sciences: Threats
- Small, isolated research groups
- Less collaboration opportunities due to competition between groups
- Too little time left for sport-related behavioural and social sciences research, available personnel busy with education and administration
- Too narrow funding base
- Career advancement difficult in sport-related behavioural and social sciences: insufficient funding and too few positions for postdoctoral researchers
- High costs of maintaining high-level research infrastructure
Sport sciences: Development proposals
- Further investments are needed in sport health sciences research.
- The focus of sport sciences research has shifted from studying the performance of elite athletes to health sciences research. Finland must continue researching the performance of elite athletes as well as the prevention and treatment of sports injuries.
- Multidisciplinary research collaboration should be increased both within sport sciences (sports biology, sport health sciences and sport-related behavioural and social sciences) and between sport sciences and other disciplines, especially nutrition.
- Finland needs to increase the utilisation of extensive databanks (biobanks) in sport sciences research. Any new data collected should be supplemented with reliable data on physical activity.
- The health and performance effects of physical activity should also be studied using methods from systems biology. This would of course require collaboration with actors proficient in such methods.
- Since Nordic sport sciences research has high international recognition, collaboration between Nordic groups should be increased, for example, through a joint funding instrument of Nordic research funding agencies. In addition, efforts should be made to establish a Nordic centre of excellence in sport sciences.
- There is great variation in publication rates and publication practices between the different fields of sport sciences. An increasing number of sport scientists should publish articles in top scientific journals.
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Veterinary medicine: SWOT analysis and development proposals
Veterinary medicine: Strengths
- Diversity of research
- Strong excellence in molecular epidemiology
- Effective recruitment of early-career researchers
- Extensive patient data thanks to Veterinary Teaching Hospital
- Good personal networks internationally
- Fairly new facilities and equipment on Viikki Campus
- Research and official operations concentrated to Viikki Campus
- Dedicated doctoral programmes (ABS – Finnish Graduate School on Applied Bioscience: Bioengineering, Food & Nutrition, Environment, and ANIWEL – Graduate School in Animal Welfare)
Veterinary medicine: Weaknesses
- Individual research fields isolated from wider cooperation
- Lack of systematic processes and documentation in and highly personal nature of international relations
- Weak appeal of researcher training and research careers
- Challenges of consolidating research and patient work, particularly in clinical work
Veterinary medicine: Opportunities
- Opportunities in the advancement of the discipline offered by translational research
- Significance of research into environmental health monitoring
- Corporate investments related to small animals
- Collaboration with BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China)
- Healthy demand for DVMs in the employment market
- Internationalisation in Finland: Finnish research communities attract foreign researchers
Veterinary medicine: Threats
- Switch to full cost model for funding, high overheads coefficient for veterinary medicine
- Cuts in funding from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
- Little recognition due to small size of discipline/funding agencies not sufficiently informed on the discipline
- Reduction in agricultural profitability
- Overall pressures to reduce the amount of doctoral training
- Winding down of research infrastructure at sectoral research institutes
- Challenges of securing the continuity of network-based doctoral programmes in the field (ABS, ANIWEL)
Veterinary medicine: Development proposals
- The research in veterinary medicine should be focused on its areas of strength, which is usually a prerequisite for smaller disciplines. Profiling and refocusing a small discipline is a multidimensional issue. Finland has one training unit in veterinary medicine, which as the most important centre of research in the field is solely responsible for the entire scope of research in veterinary medicine. Research that is exclusive to only one unit should be highly versatile and it should guarantee expertise in various fields that are needed in Finland. Success does, on the other hand, require focusing on areas of strengths.
- Translational research should be strengthened to contribute to the progress of the discipline. This will, however, require improvements in equipment-related infrastructure (e.g. imaging equipment needed in clinical veterinary medicine), which will demand more resources than the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (University of Helsinki) alone can provide.
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