Prime Minister visits IC
Gordon Brown spent time at Imperial’s South Kensington campus on Wednesday in his first visit to a UK university since becoming Prime Minister in June.
The PM, accompanied by Professor of Surgery Lord Darzi and Rector Sir Richard Sykes, toured the newly formed Institute of Biomedical Engineering in its second high-profile visit recently after being opened by the Queen earlier this year.
Lord Darzi was Chair of Surgery at Imperial until he was recently appointed as Parliamentary Undersecretary for the Department of Health by Gordon Brown, and pioneered the use of robotics and virtual operations in minimally invasive surgery which was at the centre of the visit.
The stopover is timed to coincide with Monday’s launch of the merger of Imperial College Faculty of Medicine and two highly regarded NHS trusts: St Mary’s and Hammersmith Hospitals.
The resulting “Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHNHST) will be the UK’s biggest, incorporating five hospitals: Hammersmith, Charing Cross, St Mary’s, Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea, and the Western Eye.
The merger will also create the first Academic Health Science Centre in the country, aimed at integrating healthcare services with state-of-the-art medical teaching and research. According to current estimates, the trust will have a turnover of over £750m and expects to treat one million patients a year, and will be managed by current Principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Imperial College, Prof. Stephen Smith.
Orchestrating this merger and creation of the ambitious new centre of medical excellence was one of Lord Darzi’s first duties as Undersecretary, and his appointment was the first in a rapid succession of governmental positions given to senior Imperial staff. Last week Deputy Rector Prof. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz was announced as Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council (controlling an annual research budget of £460m), and on Monday Prof. John Beddington was named as Sir David King’s successor as Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government.
This string of appointments and mergers cements Imperial’s position at the heart of governmental scientific research, especially in medicine, but comes at a time when government policy in the Department of Health is increasingly under fire over issues including rising Private Finance Initiative (PFI) costs and rock-bottom morale within the NHS. Lord Darzi currently has the difficult task of convincing doctors that such high-profile NHS decisions will in fact improve healthcare services, whilst facing a medical climate of cynicism and desperation over the perceived privatisation of the NHS.
