Rapid Responses to:

LETTERS: Alistair R Fielder, Michael Levin, and Gareth Tudor-Williams Campaign to revitalise academic medicine: Crisis in UK academia affects academic medicine too BMJ 2004; 328: 1376 [Full text]

Rapid Responses: Submit a response to this article

Rapid Responses published:

Clinical academic medicine

Somnath Mukhopadhyay   (9 June 2004)

Clinical academic medicine 9 June 2004
Somnath Mukhopadhyay, clinical senior lecturer Dundee Send response to journal: Re: Clinical academic medicine	Alistair Fielder and co-authors have highlighted a crucial problem. A successful clinical academic has to be one who is also a good clinician. Otherwise, the quality of teaching will diminish. I secured my primary medical degree in a country (India) that supplies doctors (mostly of reasonable quality) to the rest of the world, who are trained on a shoe- string budget. How does that happen? The status of clinical academics in our institution in India depended largely on their reputation as clinicians and the quality of their bedside teaching. The professors were "in competition" with each other regarding this. I remember two of them, Sital Ghosh and Sunil Sen, were greatly respected because medical students would clamber on chairs to follow their teaching while the patient (often chronic kala-azar or rheumatic heart disease!) sat in the centre. Teaching and clinical work, along with clinical research, must be the most important areas of work (and success) for the clinical academic if the medical students are to get high quality practical medical education and universities are to generate good clinical research. The RAE is encouraging academics to publish according to citation indices. This is inhibiting good work in core specialities like paediatrics. Excellent papers are published, for example, in the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, but citation indices will remain rock-bottom for this journal. The reasons for this are not just related to quality - there are many other factors at work. The RAE Executive requires to explore these factors before it puts its faith on citation indices. Meanwhile, clinical academics should be free to publish where they choose (and get credit for it) if independent clinical research is to survive in the UK. Competing interests: I work for the University of Dundee Medical School