Does a Biomedical Research Centre affect patient care in the local hospitals?

Abstract: Biomedical research can have impacts on patient care at research-active hospitals. This talk reports a qualitative evaluation of the impact of the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (Oxford BRC), a university-hospital partnership, on the effectiveness and efficiency of health care in local hospitals. The study included a review of literature on the impact of research activity on patient care; a series of interviews with the leaders of the Oxford BRC’s research to identify the direct and indirect impacts they expected their activity would have on local hospitals; and, based on that information, a series of interviews with senior clinicians responsible for patient care at Oxford’s acute hospitals to discover what impacts they observed from research generally and from Oxford BRC’s research work specifically. We identified themes emerging from the senior clinicians’ responses, and compared them with an existing taxonomy of mechanisms through which quality of health care may be affected in research-active settings. The senior clinicians responsible for patient care identified many positive impacts from research activity, including that of the Oxford BRC, but also a smaller number of negative impacts. We found the existing taxonomy of benefit types to be helpful in organising the findings, and propose modifications to further improve its usefulness.