About 6 years ago Linda Wright from NICHD recommended to the then Chair of the Section on Perinatal Pediatrics, Ann Stark, that Neonatology needed to work on a research agenda and priorities for our field. The premise was that neonatology was not realizing as a high potential for Federal funding because it was not clear what our national research priorities were. A Research Committee was formed and I volunteered to chair this effort. The original committee was primarily oriented to clinical practice issues and wanting to get these issues emphasized and addressed. Our original charge was to identify an interesting topic such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), which could be a research priority, and make a proposal to NICHD for consideration for a research workshop. Furthermore, if the workshop was successful a request for proposals would follow which would be advantageous for neonatology. The committee did not develop consensus, and I made a closing report and left for a 1-year sabbatical and returned in the summer of 2000. A new committee was formed and we developed a research agenda. We attempted to address ‘Where we are today and future research goals’. In brief, we stated that many important advances have occurred over the last several decades. Survival is markedly improved but there are significant short- and long-term morbidities. The best outcomes for the newborn are through collaboration with many subspecialties and Maternal Fetal Medicine in particular. In large part, the neonatology research effort has been directed to neonatal intensive care issues and follow-up outcome data is primarily for the first two years. We concluded that we see our field evolving from primarily addressing acute developmental and neonatal intensive care issues towards longer-range impact of preterm birth (and neonatal diseases requiring intensive care) on later health and function. We initially made a relatively broad list of research agenda under basic, translational, outcomes and clinical research headings, which was presented to the Section on Perinatal Pediatrics for discussion. Finally, we assumed that research capacity in neonatal-perinatal medicine is robust and may already be positioned to address many of the research issues outlined. However, research capacity may need to be developed in many areas through collaboration with other scientists and by supporting further development of neonatal-perinatal research and training programs. The Research Committee decided that we needed to update the Neonatal-Perinatal Training Program Survey (last edition 1996) and to add questions to begin to assess our potential for training life-time career physician-scientists to address a neonatal-perinatal research agenda.
The Committee has wrestled with the issue of developing a process to refine and to prioritize our research agenda. In December of 2002, Av Fanaroff and I attended the Perinatal and Pregnancy Branch Workshop, which had objectives similar to the present meeting. Av and I took the input from the discussions and did achieve some refinement and prioritization, which can be reviewed in the recent report, published October 2003 ‘Pregnancy and Perinatal Branch Strategic Plan 2005–2010’. This report has important information, which is germane to neonatology and for formulating the research agenda, priorities and training issues, which we addressed in further detail at this meeting.
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