It has been a great honour and privilege for me to have been appointed to the role of Director of the Institute of Clinical Sciences.
The Institute was formed as part of the College’s Life Sciences Strategy and brings together the Schools of Dentistry, Nursing, Pharmacy, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences into a single management unit.
The aim of this consolidation was not, and has not been, to reduce the unique identity of each School, but to enhance our profile and potential through a better sharing of good practice – in both teaching and research – across a range of healthcare professionals and life scientists.
To that end, I believe we have been very successful. Dentistry, in their new home on the old Pebble Mill site (which may mean something to those of you of a certain vintage!) continues to perform outstanding research with impact and their innovative teaching practices continue to garner accolades. In addition, through interactions with colleagues within the Institute, we are seeing exciting new cross-disciplinary collaborations developing that will have significant patient benefit.
In teaching, we have the unique advantage of being able to deliver a first class, inter-professional educational experience, as students from all Schools are able to interact and work with each other and thus learn, from the outset, about each other’s knowledge and skills. It is clear that the exponential growth in knowledge content and rapid improvements in technology that we are witnessing today means that the health workforce of the future will need be very different to that of now.
I believe the School of Dentistry and the Institute of Clinical Sciences are now better positioned to face that challenge.
Professor Prem Kumar