BMJ  2004;328:48-49 (3 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.48-c

Letter

Academic medicine: time for reinvention

Non-clinician scientists are the missing clinical links

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

EDITOR—An Academy of Medical Sciences report and recent articles have outlined a decline in capacity to undertake clinical research and identified the need to reconsider funding.^1-3 This has occurred despite a reorganisation of NHS research and development that aimed to create an NHS culture valuing research. The highlighted changes in university appointments, which have encouraged clinical academics to engage in more basic research, have perhaps also been accompanied by neglect of the role of other NHS staff willing and critically able to support research activity.

Surprisingly, non-clinician scientists in medical research were not mentioned at all, although they were the focus of an earlier academy report.⁴ That report urged "an imaginative approach... to questions of funding long-term posts for contract research workers" and identified other problems experienced by non-clinically qualified research staff in a clinical environment. These included exclusion, now further apparent from the academy's most recent report.³ . . . [Full text of this article]

Injury Research, Clinical Sciences Building, Hope Hospital, Salford M6 8HD shopkins@man.ac.uk

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