Editor—Clark and Smith's call to revive academic medicine is laudable.1 The form that research into health care as a discipline and industry takes, be it scholarly inquiry or commercial pursuit, will vary and rebalance itself constantly according to environmental pressures. However, medical research, laboratory or clinical, is unlikely to ever become extinct or purely commercial.
I say this because the output of medical research can be easily measured in terms of grants, publications, and patents. So long as these tangible measures are in place, medical research and researchers will be rewarded. The rewards should therefore be made enticing enough for healthcare staff to be drawn to research and for the desired research to be performed.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of medical education, the other part of academic medicine. Few reliable measures of teaching excellence currently exist, and those that do rely heavily on subjective assessments by superiors, peers, and students or exclusive modes of recognition such as awards that carry scant attraction for clinicians. Indeed, career advancement of clinical academics depends more on research output than teaching.2
The continued production of doctors probably depends more on the quality of students who enter medical training than the quality of the teaching they receive. I wonder whether consumers would accept the same academic “rigour” being applied to the training of airline pilots, or the same quality control in medical education being used for automotive production lines.
Medical research may require revitalisation. Medical education needs a lot more.
Competing interests: None declared.
References
- 1.Clark J, Smith R. BMJ Publishing Group to launch an international campaign to promote academic medicine. BMJ 2003;327: 1001-2. (1 November.) [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2.Stewart PM. Academic medicine: a faltering engine. BMJ 2002;324: 437-8. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]