Dr. Paul Hébert of Ottawa has started a five-year term as president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Ottawa scientist and palliative care physician Dr. Paul Hébert has served in many roles during his career: clinical scientist at Ottawa’s Bruyère Health Research Institute, internationally recognized critical care researcher, professor and former editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal among them.
This one he calls a job of a lifetime.
Earlier in January Hébert took over as president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), a job he will hold for a five-year term.
CIHR is the federal agency that funds health and medical research across Canada with the goal of improving the health of Canadians by creating new knowledge, translating that into better health services and products and strengthening the Canadian health-care system.
That is a big task, especially in the current climate. Hébert’s appointment comes at a time when Canada’s health system is under increasing pressure, especially when it comes to primary-care access. Some 17 per cent of Canadians are without primary-care providers and the situation is worsening.
Meanwhile, CIHR has been criticized for stagnant funding that makes it increasingly hard for scientists to get research money to do their work. It has an annual budget of $1.34 billion, about 95 per cent of which goes to scientific research, according to the agency. That money compares unfavorably with similar research funding bodies in the United States and United Kingdom, for example, which have narrower mandates. In the U.S. the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, invests around $47 billion in medical research.
Evening Update
Hébert acknowledged that CIHR had a fixed budget that made it difficult to fully achieve its mandate to create new knowledge and translate it into improved health for Canadians and a stronger health system. It is working to maximize the funding it has through partnerships, better co-ordination and targeted priorities, he said.
“I recognize that funds are limited and we are doing our very best to target areas of highest impact,” Hébert said. “Our focus in coming years is really going to be on maximizing the return on investment to Canadians.”
Among key priorities is helping to support work on primary care, he said. Some officials with the funding agency have had preliminary conversations with Dr. Jane Philpott, the former federal health minister who has become a leading champion of health system changes to ensure primary health-care access for all Canadians. In 2024, the Ontario government appointed Philpott to head a new team with a mandate to connect every person in Ontario to a primary-care provider within the next five years.
Hébert said CIHR was working on a pan-Canadian strategy focused on improving access to primary care. That could include help co-ordinating support from other organizations and bringing in advice from experiences around the world in addition to supporting research.
Similar work has or will be done in other priority areas, such as dementia, long-term care, youth mental health and more, he said. Building national networks is a key role for the funding institute, he said, to help maximize investments.
Hébert also acknowledges it is an ongoing challenge to make people understand why discovery-driven scientific research is key to Canada’s future wellbeing.
“It is way easier to say we are going to fix primary care,” he said.
He noted internationally recognized Ottawa stem cell scientist Dr. Michael Rudnicki’s discovery-driven research, much of it done with the help of CIHR funding, eventually resulted in a paradigm shifting finding about the role of stem cells in Duchenne muscular dystrophy leading to possible treatment. Rudnicki co-founded a company that is now in the early stages of testing an oral treatment.
“It really takes a lot of help and support to make sure that people understand how important this stuff is,” Hebert said. “In the end, a lot of the stuff we do drives economies. (It) either helps directly in peoples’ lives with cures or treatments or it helps with developing new products that improve the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”
CIHR, established in 2000, is an independent agency of the federal government accountable to Parliament through the minister of health. It is composed of 13 institutes.
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