AAMC Responds to Crisis In Research Training

The nation's medical schools have joined a host of agencies and institutions in the biomedical research community in voicing concern about the future of clinical research.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has created the Task Force on Clinical Research and charged it with recommending ways to enhance the institutional infrastructure necessary to support clinical research. The task force has 20 members comprising administrators, senior faculty members, and researchers at the nation's leading medical schools.

The co-chairs are Steven G. Gabbe, M.D., dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and Dennis C. Brimhall, president and chief executive officer at the University of Colorado Hospital. There are no psychiatrists on the panel.

“The AAMC believes that it is uniquely the responsibility of medical schools and teaching hospitals, in partnership with the NIH and other federal agencies, to provide both the supportive institutional environment and the rigorous training necessary to maintain high-quality clinical research and produce and nurture physician scientists equipped to exploit the many novel and exciting scientific opportunities that have appeared in recent years,” the AAMC stated in its charge to the task force.

The task force follows a similar 1998 panel convened by the AAMC that developed a set of recommendations directed at the training of clinical investigators, the supportive infrastructure of academic medical centers, the administration of clinical trials, and the interface of clinical research with evolving academic health care delivery systems.

The new task force will focus on the adequacy of the institutional infrastructure required to support clinical research and recommend steps to strengthen that infrastructure.

APA President Michelle Riba, M.D., who has made education in clinical research a priority during her presidency, applauded the creation of the AAMC panel, saying it dovetails well with efforts by the Institute of Medicine and the National Institute of Mental Health.

“While there are no psychiatrists on the task force, we are confident that the group will seek input from psychiatrist researchers and scientists,” Riba said. “It's important for academic medicine to foster clinical research. You want the physicians who take care of patients to be the ones to ask the research questions and be able to study the issues. It helps patients in the long run for the clinician to have clinical research skills.

“A lot of the questions being asked and funded are not necessarily really clinically relevant,” she added.

Riba was one of six psychiatrists on an Institute of Medicine panel that produced the 2003 report titled “Research Training in Psychiatry Training: Strategies for Reform” (Psychiatric News, December 5, 2003).

More recently, NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D., convened the National Psychiatry Training Council (NPTC), which is charged with developing a vision for reforming psychiatry residency training and building in a flexible core that will ensure clinical competence while fostering earlier specialization and in-depth training in areas such as patient-oriented research and geriatric and public psychiatry.

The NPTC is headed by John Greden, M.D., chair of the APA Council on Research and the department of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, and James Leckman, M.D., director of research at the Yale Child Study Center.▪