Transfer of OGC projects

In 2002, an international review panel evaluated the Foundation's first five years. Following its recommendations, the Foundation is increasing its focus on meeting the needs of managers and policy makers working in Canada's healthcare system. As part of this reorientation, the Foundation is transferring the project portion of its Open Grants Competition to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, where the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research will be its "champion." The Foundation will retain the program portion. We believe that transferring the project portion of this competition to CIHR will provide a number of benefits to health services research and evidence-based decision-making in Canada.

Upholding the spirit of the Open Grants Competition

CIHR will maintain the Open Grants Competition as a separate entity from its other funding programs, with separate, dedicated staffing. It will preserve the high quality of the competition, as well as the philosophy put in place by the Foundation - successful applications will still require partnerships with decision makers and will be supported through matching funding. CIHR will employ merit review panels to ensure that the results are both relevant to decision makers and meet the highest standards of scientific excellence. During this transition, the Foundation will help CIHR organize merit review panels.

More funding for health services research and a broadened set of eligible themes

The transfer of the project portion of the competition will almost certainly lead to more money being available through this competition, beginning in 2005. CIHR, through its institutes, will contribute $1 million or more annually to the competition, and it will expand the themes to cover at least those identified as priorities from this year's Listening for Direction II exercise.

The Foundation will continue to support the nursing community by providing up to $200,000 annually to CIHR from the Nursing Research Fund to use as matching funds for projects funded under the "nursing leadership, organization, and policy" theme.

At the same time, the Foundation will redesign the program model to ensure junior researchers and regions with fewer resources will not be negatively affected.

Continuing support for our current researchers

In addition to issuing a call for new projects in the 2005 competition, CIHR will assume the management of many of the projects funded through the Open Grants Competition that are currently underway, through to completion. The Foundation is in the process of determining which research teams will be affected by these changes, and we will provide full details once they are available.

We are pleased that CIHR will maintain the Foundation's philosophy of linkage and exchange between researchers and decision makers. To ensure a smooth handover for our current researchers, the Foundation will loan staff to CIHR to help them through the transition period. While theses changes consolidate project funding in one agency, it by no means ends the relationship between the Foundation and our funded researchers. We will continue to include our funded researchers in other activities, programs of research, and our theme area networks.

More useful results for decision-making

Just as syntheses of many studies are generally more useful for decision-making, programs of research provide broader and more applicable results, making them of greater potential use for decision makers.

In the coming months, as we focus on programs of research, we will also redesign our program model to ensure it better serves the decision-maker community. More information will be made available as we move forward, but we know we want to incorporate more capacity development initiatives into these programs of research.

More co-sponsorship opportunities for our partners

The third-party co-sponsoring partners have played an important role in developing the Open Grants Competition and making it successful, and the Foundation and CIHR are jointly discussing their continued role in and support of the competition. These partners will have not only more thematic options available but also more complementary options, as they will be able to work with the Foundation on programs of research and CIHR on projects of research. We believe this is a positive move for our key co-sponsoring partners and for the researcher and decision-maker communities.

The transfer of the Open Grants Competition projects will help reinforce the evolving separate but complementary niches of the two organizations: CIHR focusing on project grants and awards, and the Foundation focusing on programs of research and knowledge synthesis. We are confident that this is a key step to fulfilling our mandate of increasing the amount of evidence-based decision-making being used in the healthcare system.

If you would like more information on the transfer, please call Linda Murphy at 613-728-2238 or e-mail OGCProjectsTransfer@chsrf.ca.
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