Has academic medicine lost its leadership role?
Many of us believe academic medicine is in crisis.1-3 Tugwell, Professor of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, has written of the need to “bring people together to debate whether the existing structure of academic medicine is still fundamentally sound and, if not, to propose alternatives to it”.1 Editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, DeAngelis, recently wrote that “the traditional 3-legged stool of academic medicine comprising education, patient care, and research is broken. The education leg is currently being held together by peanut butter and bubble gum combined with the unselfish persistence of faculty dedicated to teaching”.2 The other core roles are also under threat. Much medical research today is done outside academic medicine, for example in institutes of biotechnology and biomedicine. And most clinical service, even in teaching hospitals, is provided by non-academic doctors.
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- 1 School of Medicine, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD.
- 2 Department of Medical Oncology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW.
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- 5. International Working Party to Promote and Revitalise Academic Medicine. ICRAM (International Campaign to Revitalise Academic Medicine): agenda setting. BMJ 2004; 329: 787-789.