DECISION ANNOUNCED ON RESEARCH SCHOLARSHIPS
IGNACIO H. DE LARRAMENDI 2017
Fundación MAPFRE has awarded 275,000 euros to 10 research projects due to be carried out mainly in research centers, universities, companies and hospitals in Spain, France, Great Britain, Brazil and Canada, to develop projects related to promoting health (5 grants), insurance and social protection (4).
The organization has also awarded the Primitivo de Vega Research Grant, worth 15,000 euros, aimed at undertaking a scientific study in the field of care for the elderly.
Among the health projects, one that stands out is going to be undertaken by Dr. Tomás Vecina, Director of the Foundation for Research, Teaching and Innovation in Patient Safety (FIDISP), to discover the knowledge that children of school age have about the concepts of patient safety and safe practices, and to develop an educational campaign to contribute towards preventing the risk of accidents with medication, the risk of infections and problems caused by poor identification. The project has the support of an advisory board made up of healthcare professionals, teachers, education experts and child psychologists.
In this category, in which a total of 213 requests were submitted, another program that stands out is the one to be undertaken by a foreign center, the Mexican National Institute of Public Health, with the objective of creating a national epidemiological observatory that identifies risk factors associated with obesity and its associated chronic diseases and which contributes to preventing them. To achieve this, the aforementioned institution will be developing a mobile app based on crowdsourcing, that will allow anyone to scan the barcode of a product at its point of sale and if, according to the nutritional content, consuming it is not advisable, the app will enable you to view healthier alternatives.
Among the grants awarded to support research into the fields of insurance and social protection, a noteworthy project is the one that will be developed by Patricia Carracedo, Professor of Economics at the International University of Valencia, with the double objective of helping public institutions to distribute resources efficiently and also to assist actuaries in the preparation of life insurance policies and pension plans. The work is based on studying European countries over time and their ability to incorporate spatial and temporal dependence on death at advanced (and therefore unproductive) ages, using a model that best represents the position between countries.
In this field, it is also worth highlighting the grant received by Luis Eduardo Afonso, of the University of São Paulo (Brazil), to develop microsimulation techniques to measure the impact of the new legislation on pensions in that country.
As part of this call, which attracted more than 60 project submissions, Fundación MAPFRE also awarded the Primitivo de Vega Research Grant, which this year fell to the team led by Dr. Nuria Farré from the Cardiology Department at the Research Institute of the Hospital del Mar (Barcelona), whose objective is to assess whether the joint intervention by a cardiologist and a geriatrician reduces readmissions into hospital for death by any cause including that of heart failure (HF) within a period of one year. The project seeks to demonstrate that a direct collaboration between the geriatrician and the cardiologist results in a better prognosis and quality of life for patients with HF, one of the main causes of admissions for patients over 65 years old and which carries with it a high associated healthcare expense.
The total amount of these grants over the last ten years comes to over 14 million euros.
You can consult the results in more detail at www.fundacionmapfre.org.