Imperial: former health minister appointed to head health innovation body

Ara Darzi has been appointed to head the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI), which was launched this week at Imperial College London.

The IGHI will build upon Imperial’s expertise in global health and technology innovation and its strengths in multidisciplinary working. The Institute will work closely with governments, non-governmental organisations and companies to ensure innovations in healthcare and health policy have an impact across the world.

Darzi is credited with pioneering the use of minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery in the UK and also helped develop new training methods that involve the use of virtual reality to allow surgeons to practice their skills. In addition, he has been involved in World Health Organisation initiatives to improve the safety of patients undergoing surgery across the world. From 2007 to 2009 he was a health minister.

Darzi said healthcare systems all over the world are facing completely different pressures compared to 20 years ago. “Life expectancy has increased dramatically, lifestyle diseases such as obesity are rife, and non-communicable diseases such as diabetes are increasingly becoming a problem in developing countries as well as in the West. We can't just build more hospitals or buy more beds; the whole way in which we provide healthcare has got to change. The world is crying out for low cost, high impact technologies that can be employed widely across the globe.”

Imperial has a track record in coming up with discoveries in medicine and engineering, but for those breakthroughs to have a real impact, they need to feed into policy. “I've had a particular interest in policy for the last four or five years and I understand the different sorts of challenges facing us in healthcare across the world. I think the solutions are there, and the Institute of Global Health Innovation will provide us with a platform to make that change happen and to have that impact globally.”

Research at the IGHI will seek to develop systems for training medics and improving patient safety using low-cost methods. Darzi has already pioneered the use of surgical safety checklists that are proven to lower the risk of harmful outcomes for patients. Improving access to information and training for doctors in developing countries is a challenge that he believes the new institute is ideally placed to tackle. “Technology is the means to the end; it's not the end,” he said. "We need the right business models around technologies to make them sustainable in any healthcare system, whether it’s in Africa or in Scotland.”