General practitioners should be enticed into academic research by means of "distinction awards" given to those who reach a senior level, according to the higher education funding councils and the Department of Education in Northern Ireland.
This would help departments of general practice, many of which say they cannot find enough staff, says a report by the councils. The recommendation is the result of a monitoring exercise which found "an urgent need to secure long-term support for teaching and research in general practice settings".
NHS resources have shifted to general practice and other community settings in the provision of teaching and research, the report says. One of the bars to developing research in this area is "a relative absence of suitable early academic career development posts and lack of comparability in awards at the senior level."
The Joint Medical Advisory Committee of the funding councils and the Northern Ireland department say that GPs who become salaried academics should be treated the same as other academic doctors with clinical responsibilities. One way of achieving this would be a distinction award, which would enable them to "achieve comparability with their colleagues in other departments", the report says.
The report will be presented to the House of Lords science and technology committee next week. It supports recent suggestions that the funding councils should get involved in assessing NHS medical research as well as university research, to avoid duplication. The assessment of NHS research is likely to start as a result a recommendation in the Culyer report published last year.
The committee also wants universities to have some say in appointing regional directors of research and development, who will become increasingly influential over NHS research.
There is a general need for closer collaboration between the NHS and universities in both teaching and research, says the report. And as the clinical and administrative sides both try to squeeze more out of their academic clinicians, there is a need for close monitoring of the quality of teaching and research.
Report on the Interaction between Universities and the NHS in the Provision of Medical and Dental Education and Research is published by Hefce.