The RCSI's new £10 million Education and Research Centre at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital is designed to dovetail medical research, clinical practice and the education of doctors into one, unique, high tech unit. It aims to put advances in research into patient treatments as quickly as possible, providing practitioners with immediate access to research teams and enabling medical students to be at the forefront of research.

Launched in September in the grounds of Beaumont Hospital, it also represents the most significant investment ever made by an Irish educational institution in a hospital campus.

Beaumont Hospital is the RCSI's largest teaching hospital. Research staff of the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital cover a wide range of health science disciplines, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, gastroenterology, neurosciences, respiratory diseases and transplant biology.

The centre provides a unique facility to both patients and medical personnel alike. According to Anthony Cunningham, Professor of Anaesthesia and clinical vice dean of the RCSI: "If one of the cardiologists, for example, has a new drug to treat angina, or one of the gastroentestinal physicians has a drug to treat irritable bowel syndrome, they can admit patients here, observe them and do tests. That's a unique facility in the country."

The ground floor of the three-storey, 48,000 sq ft building is dedicated to research and is designed to integrate basic and clinical research towards a better understanding of diseases and how they should be treated. The open-plan format of the main laboratory, with a central hub of core facilities, allows collaboration and makes the best possible use of facilities.

"The scale of the space and the quality of the bench research material is really top drawer," says Prof Cunningham. "The design of it is such that there are open plan benches on the perimeter and core cell culture, cytology equipment in the centre."

There are also different designated areas within the laboratory, including areas for HEA grant holders as well as representatives from medicine and surgery.

The first floor of the building is home to an integrated teaching laboratory, including a computer-assisted learning facility, a crisis management education centre, conference and tutorial rooms, as well as academic offices. The integrated teaching laboratory accommodates 96 students and is used for undergraduate pathology and microbiology teaching. The teaching laboratory contains 46 desktop computers, with one for each pair of students. On these they can work individually, or in connection with a central control station.

The 70-seater conference room has ISDN links for teleconferencing, and is fitted with wall-mounted data projectors, slide and overhead projectors. There are also data inputs in the room including Internet and TV access, as well as relays from operating theatres, intensive care and accident and emergency units in Beaumont Hospital.

The education area also includes a unique, three-roomed interconnecting facility comprising a crisis management unit with anaesthetic machine and ventilator, piped gas, haemodynamic monitoring and patient simulations. Adjacent to it is a clinical skills laboratory containing an array of teaching equipment. A six-bed patient assessment unit, with room for small group teaching activities, is also included.

"The crisis management unit allows us to simulate an operation," explains Prof Cunningham. "With it we have a surgeon, an anaesthetist and a nurse, and we go through how they communicate with each other. We can then simulate how they cope with a crisis."

The top floor of the centre is used by the college's departments of microbiology and pathology, where screening tests, such as smear tests for women, are processed, and where laboratory technicians are taught.

In all, the RCSI Education and Research Centre provides a unique facility for students of the college, and one which is used throughout their training. At full capacity, some 250 people will work in the centre, including staff of both the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital, as well as post-doctoral research students. Funding for the 46,000 sq ft development came from a number of sources, including donations, grant assistance through the Higher Education Authority (HEA) and college borrowings.

`To date, patient-orientated research has been limited in this country by resources," says Professor Kevin O'Malley, chief executive of the RCSI. "Now both patients and consultants will benefit from these new state-of-the-art research facilities. In an environment where medical education is increasingly hospital-based, the close proximity of patients to researchers and students is increasingly important. This new facility provides such an environment."

The role the centre will play in attracting research expertise to Ireland is evidenced by the appointment of Dr Dermot Kenny as director of the Clinical Research Centre within the Education and Research Centre. He graduated as a physician in 1982 and, like many others in his field, left the country to pursue a research career in the US.

"To put it simply," says Dr Kenny, "I came back to Ireland only because this centre became available. A centre such as this brings back people with very significant research careers abroad. As such it is wonderful for patients, for education and for the country as a whole."