Four pillars of academic medicine need to be restored

Editor—Furness and Atkinson made several points that should be brought to the notice of the Department of Health, and the regional health departments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, if clinical academic medicine of any quality is to be retained in the United Kingdom.¹,²

All the talk about improving recruitment to academic medicine (in the United Kingdom) is pointless unless Abbasi's pillars of academic medicine—research, implementation of evidence, teaching, and improved delivery of health care—are restored for clinical academics.³ Under the current regime, university management has to deliver the requirements of the research assessment exercise. The only hope therefore lies in the BMA and the departments of health influencing the process of the research assessment exercise to allow points to be awarded in a manner that pays roughly equal respect to all of Abbasi's pillars—rather than just one—in relation to the work of clinical academics.

The loss of academic freedom referred to in Atkinson's letter requires further careful analysis and introspection by the powers that are implementing the research assessment exercise. Do we want to go down in history as the generation that screwed up academic freedom in the country that invented it?