University hospitals should do more practical research: Dutch health council

University teaching hospitals should be doing more to research everyday diseases and prevention issues rather than pumping millions of euros into specialist projects, the Dutch health council says in a new report.

In particular, the health council says the country’s main research centres, concentrated in the eight teaching hospitals, should work more closely with family doctors, specialists in geriatric medicine and district nurses.

While much current research is ‘world-beating’ social issues such as keeping care affordable are barely dealt with, the council, an important government advisory group, said.

Research is increasingly paid for on the basis of performance and researchers are judged by the number of papers they write for prestigious medical journals, the report’s authors argue. This, in turn, does not encourage research in less popular areas such as geriatrics.

However, Ernst Kuipers, chairman of the teaching hospital umbrella group NFU, told the Volkskrant that hospitals do take a broad approach and involve all segments of the healthcare sector in their research projects.