文章基本信息

标题：Canadian M.D.-Ph.D. Programs Produce Impactful Physician-Scientists: The McGill Experience
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作者：Tianwei E. Zhou ; Paul A. Savage ; Mark J. Eisenberg 等
期刊名称：Journal of Biomedical Education
印刷版ISSN：2314-5021
电子版ISSN：2314-503X
出版年度：2016
卷号：2016
DOI：10.1155/2016/3836467
出版社：Hindawi Publishing Corporation
摘要：On June 18, 2015, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced that it would terminate funding to M.D.-Ph.D. programs due to budget constraints, against the recommendations from two advisory panels. CIHR’s M.D.-Ph.D. program grants, which amounted to an annual average of $1.8 million in the form of 14 six-year studentships, represent only 0.15% of CIHR’s $1.2 billion operating budget. As over half of M.D.-Ph.D. trainees are dependent on these studentships, this poses a threat to physician-scientist training in Canada. In response to the current volatile funding climate, we surveyed McGill University’s M.D.-Ph.D. program alumni to assess its success in producing physician-scientists. In this program, 60.0% of graduates who have completed training have become physician-scientists, the majority being retained in Canada. These individuals have attained positions with sufficiently protected time for research and had grant success and significant publications for early- to mid-career investigators. This suggests that the current M.D.-Ph.D. system is an effective way of producing competent physician-scientists. As physician-scientists have remarkably contributed to Canadian healthcare innovation despite making up a fraction of physicians and researchers, vulnerability in the M.D.-Ph.D. pipeline would invariably affect the health of Canadians.