Other potential funding bodies and partners
The proposed research programme comprises fields of study that are hosted by two of the Academy’s four Research Councils, i.e. the Research Council for Culture and Society (social sciences, economics, administration, demographics and political science) and the Research Council for Health (clinical medicine, public health and nursing science). One of the objectives of the programme is to encourage new researchers particularly from the disciplines in the field of culture and society to turn their attention to questions of health care and health policy. Representatives from both these Research Councils would make up the backbone of the steering committee.
Other potential national funding bodies include university health care districts (so-called EVO funding), the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the Social Insurance Institution, the Association of Regional and Local Authorities and FinOHTA. The Research Council presidium has met with the working group appointed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health to identify priority areas for the allocation of central government transfers to health research and has had preliminary discussions with this working group on the possibility of funding cooperation with the hospital districts within the proposed research programme. The working group encouraged the Academy of Finland to contact the university hospital districts, which have initially shown a positive interest in such cooperation. Earlier a report by Mr Martti Kekomäki from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health has proposed that these same mechanisms of funding be also applied to health services research.
With respect to international funding and research collaboration, there have been preliminary discussions with the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). There have also been preliminary talks with the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain. In Denmark, the director of a national research institute working in the field of health services research has been contacted to discuss the possibility of increased Nordic funding and research collaboration. One possible format of international funding cooperation is to network projects funded through the research programme into other corresponding projects that are being launched at the same time in the Netherlands, Great Britain and other Nordic countries. The main goal of this cooperation is to facilitate joint evaluation of the projects, but also to give projects the opportunity to apply for funding from other countries.