SAPC

THE SOCIETY FOR ACADEMIC

PRIMARY CARE

2 December 2002

Dear Sir Gareth

RAE CONSULTATION: CONTRIBUTION FROM THE SOCIETY FOR ACADEMIC PRIMARY CARE AND THE HEADS OF DEPARTMENTS OF GENERAL PRACTICE AND PRIMARY CARE IN THE UK

Many thanks for allowing us to respond today: these comments were agreed at our meeting at the end of last week. They are made in the understanding that radical changes in higher education and its funding structures may well have taken place by the time of the next RAE. Our key concerns and suggestions, which mostly relate to UoA2, are as follows:

  1. The RAE needs to understand the severe competing demands on the energies of clinical academics in all disciplines and the virtual impossibility of combining significant clinical activity with both high quality teaching and internationally-competitive research.
  1. The 2001 RAE, partly because of institutional attempts to second guess the rules and to play games, and partly because of its funding consequences, has had a damaging effect on the numbers and morale of clinical academics whose main medical school contribution is to teaching. Teaching Quality Assessment, if it is to be conducted separately from the RAE, must in future have financial teeth.
  1. We believe that the next RAE should attempt to find ways of measuring and rewarding the quality of scholarship of institutions and their academic health, rather than focussing narrowly on individual research outputs – people as well as papers.
  1. This means that the next RAE ought to pay attention to and reward achievement in capacity building in academic medicine, staff development and training and the maintenance of research infrastructures. The way in which institutions can include the output of young academics within the RAE return, without prejudice to their overall assessment, needs to be considered.
  1. Whenever possible we would like to see an assessment of research outcome, as well as research process. This means that institutional evidence about the impact of research on practice, clinical care and health service delivery should be specifically assessed and included as a quality marker.
  1. If numbers of other medically related disciplines are incorporated in an expanded UoA2 in the next RAE we would strongly advise retaining discipline-specific subpanels to assess and reward activities as described above, particularly research impact.

2.

  1. We do not believe that bibliometric analysis in multidisciplinary research offers a robust methodology for assessing research quality.

One of the telling comments made about the range of medical research returned in 2001 was that it looked over-managed and ‘fashionable’, as opposed to risk-taking. The diversity of effort in the community-based sciences should, when quality is high, be perceived as a positive feature of academic activity. In the assessment of the relative strengths of the molecular sciences and of primary care and health services research, it will be important for future RAEs to bear in mind the much longer ‘cycle time’ from research question to trial result in HSR and the commensurately lower rate of publication arising from large trials of complex interventions.

We hope these comments are helpful to you, and look forward to seeing the results of your review.

With best wishes

Yours sincerely

Professor Roger Jones

Chairman

Society for Academic Primary Care