Over 20 years Fiona Stanley has shown an unwavering commitment to the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.
THE name Fiona Stanley has become synonymous with caring for the needs of children.
Professor Stanley’s ongoing research, combined with her groundbreaking database work performed decades ago (which she believes put WA on the map from a medical research perspective) has led to an enviable position as one of the world’s foremost child health advocates.
The Australian of the Year Award she received in 2003 is among a plethora of plaques, trophies and degrees that decorate her office at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, which she founded in 1990, although there are cupboards full of other honours that can’t fit onto the walls (and she admits to preferring cheques to citations).
And for the past 20 years as director at the institute she has been tackling issues and complex diseases facing children around the globe; but she says there’s still plenty to do.
During the late 1980s, Professor Stanley’s position on the board at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children gave her the opportunity to see the work being undertaken within the Telethon-sponsored research unit, for which she has nothing but praise.
Realising the calibre of the hospital researchers (suggesting they were “potentially the world’s best”) and being familiar with those working at the University of Western Australia (due to her database work), she established the institute at a time when her data was pointing to significant immediate challenges such as rising incidents of asthma, cerebral palsy and Sids.
“Why don’t we bring all these people together and see if we can form an institute which can really research the cause of disease and of course improve treatments for kids?” Professor Stanley says.
“The whole thing that drove us was trying to identify causes of problems and therefore trying to prevent it.
“A lot of it was a dream, and for a dream you need a lot of people helping you along the way.”
It’s a dream Professor Stanley stresses has come true, with the institute employing 500 people and attracting $30 million into WA through grant and research tenders.
“Now we’re considered to be one of the top multi-disciplinary research institutes in the nation, people say we’re world class ... and we are world class in asthma and allergy research, birth defects research, Aboriginal health research and in child cancer research; but I think we’ve got quite a way to go,” she says.
The institute is an independent not-for-profit organisation, so that “long way to go” means lobbying the public and private sectors for funding -– an increasingly difficult task.
“We haven’t got anything like the support for research the other states have,” she says.
“Our state governments have not been adequately supportive.
“I am very anxious that we will be able to continue to do well if we don’t get more support from the government. It’s not a sustainable level and the other states are saying ‘this is something we want to invest in big time’.
“What happens then is we lose our good people: we’ve lost one from this institute and five other top researchers have just left WA in the last six months. That’s a brain drain and what goes with them is the grants.”
Professor Stanley says the most important part of her job is recruiting and retaining the best scientists.
“You live, eat and breathe the place so you’re always looking out for opportunities of things that will help improve the institute, like any CEO does,” she says.
“At the moment we’re planning a new building so we’ll be going down to the new children’s hospital (the Fiona Stanley Hospital in Murdoch).
“That’s a big thing to again sell the institute to the state and federal governments, so we can get a new building to move with the children’s hospital.”
However she’s adamant that funding remains her biggest challenge despite the corporate community lending its support, although she says they could be doing more.
“I wish we could somehow excite the high net worth individuals out there,” Professor Stanley says.
“If there were 10 high net worth individuals giving us two to five million dollars each I wouldn’t have to fundraise ever again.
“We need the support to survive.”