BMJ  2004;328:45 (3 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.45-a

Letter

Academic medicine: time for reinvention

Medical education especially needs help

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

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 . . . [Full text of this article]

Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, National University Hospital, Singapore 119074 obgcys@nus.edu.sg

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