6533b852fe1ef96bd12aaa62

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Research and Clinical Routine in the next Century,Segregation or Cooperative Networks?

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Reading the daily newspaper one gets the impression that German universities and clinical research in particular are in a deep crisis, and that German professors are to be blamed for it. In medicine, additional insufficiencies of the system are obvious, beginning with corruption cases brought up against clinicians and ending with conflicts of interest due to the fact that clinical professors in addition to research and teaching devote much of their time to the special care of private patients. These headlines in the news tend to let us forget that during the last decade grant moneys for research projects stagnated whereas the number of grant applications has increased out of proportion. In Germany state governments are primarily obliged to finance the universities, and in 1996 spent some 5 billion German marks for clinical research and teaching. Most of that money, however, is used to balance the deficits arising from patient care not paid by insurances, outpatient care in particular. Only recently university hospitals have begun to redefine their legal status enabling them to better illustrate money flow within the system.