BMJ  2004;328:46 (3 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.46-b

Letter

Academic medicine: time for reinvention

Academic research should wind down, not up

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

EDITOR—Clark and Smith announce a crisis in academic medicine and call for an international campaign to re-establish its credentials.¹ This assertive policy marks a turning point for a discipline that has to date adopted a defensive posture in the developing healthcare environment.²

Unlike healthcare research, where the impact on service delivery has been minimal, research in academic medicine has delivered many important innovations. But, unfortunately, academic research still reflects a store in which researchers are busy filling shelves with a comprehensive set of all possible relevant studies that a decision maker might some day drop by to purchase.³ The endeavour is characterised by a voluminous literature, invariably driven by the dictates of funding spirals and accreditation exercises and, in many cases, irrelevant to the efficient production of health against a background of limited public resources.

This retail perspective on research overlooks two important economic insights.

. . . [Full text of this article]

St Thomas Medical Group, St Thomas Health Centre, Exeter EX4 1HJ su1838@eclipse.co.uk

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