Today, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) joined his colleagues to introduce a bill to stop the across-the-board budget cuts scheduled for March 1st with a balance of increased revenue and sensible investments. The Balancing Act will halt impending automatic federal budget cuts, known as “sequester,” which would threaten important national investments like those in medical research—a staple of Washington State’s economy. Read more here.
Yesterday Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA) introduced the Primary Care Workforce Access Improvement Act of 2013 (HR 487). Their bill promotes the training of primary care physicians in rural areas and tests innovative and cost-neutral ways to distribute graduate medical education (GME) payments for the purpose of increasing the number and quality of primary care physicians in the United States. This could prove helpful to the UW WWAMI program, which focuses on producing primary care physicians for a five-state region (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho). Learn more here.
NIH Director Francis Collins calls the potential cuts from sequestration a “profound and devastating blow” for medical research. If Congress cannot find a way to achieve debt reduction without massive federal spending cuts, NIH will lose 6.4 percent of its budget this year. This could hurt the availability of research grants. Currently, 80 percent of NIH funding goes to university and medical school researchers but the odds of award have been declining in recent years. According to Collins, only one in six of those that apply receive grants; the chances used to be one in three. And all of this could get much worse if sequestration is implemented.
Read more at Politico.com.
On December 3rd, NIH Director Francis Collins announced the selection of Richard Nakamura, Ph.D., as the new director of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR). Dr. Nakamura has been serving as the acting director of CSR since September 2011 and has previously been both the scientific director and the deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Find more information in the NIH press release at: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/dec2012/od-03.htm.
To help improve health outcomes of patients who require emergency care, the National Institutes of Health has created a new Office of Emergency Care Research (OECR). The office is a focal point for basic, clinical and translational emergency care research and training across NIH. Although OECR will not fund grants, it will foster innovation and improvement in emergency care and in the training of future researchers in this field by:
The creation of OECR is the culmination of more than five years of discussions between NIH and the emergency medicine community. OECR also responds to reports about the nation’s emergency medical system issued in 2006 by the Institute of Medicine.
Read more here.