Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to improve stroke research capacity in the UK.

The report published by the Stroke Association compares research spend in four disease areas (stroke, cancer, coronary heart disease and dementia) by governmental organisations and charities.

The usual practice of the two main public funders of health research – the Department’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) - is not to ring-fence funds for expenditure on particular topics or disease areas: research proposals in all areas compete for the funding available.

NIHR expenditure on research on stroke, cancer, cardiovascular disease (CVD) (including coronary heart disease) and dementia is shown in the following table.

£ million

Through its training and career development programmes, the NIHR supports clinicians at all stages of their career: integrated clinical and academic training; doctoral training; postdoctoral training; and more senior awards. The prestigious NIHR Senior Investigator award provides an additional incentive for the country’s most outstanding clinical researchers. These programmes make a major contribution to the building and developing of research capacity in stroke and other disease areas.