Abstract
Research in the health sciences is needed in order to continue to improve patient care. A survey was distributed to investigate barriers to research among Dentistry, Nursing and Allied Health Professionals academic faculty at a public health sciences university in the United States. Among the 86 faculty respondents, the majority (58%) of faculty identified “lack of time for me to do research” to be the single largest barrier to their own research activity and this item had a higher mean score than all other barriers to research examined. Lack of time was significantly more problematic among female faculty (p=0.006). Research resources were a greater barrier than relevance of research (p<0.001). Respondents noted that clinical duties are frequently a higher priority than research among health sciences faculty, presumably due to shortages in funding and resources. Given the importance of research to the future quality of patient care, efforts should be made to protect health science faculty members’ time and to provide the resources necessary to conduct meaningful research.
Highlights
Ongoing high quality research in the health sciences is needed in order to continue to achieve advances in patient care
This study has identified lack of time to be by far the single largest barrier to research activity
Our finding that lack of time is the largest barrier to faculty research activity is consistent with conclusions drawn from previous studies [9,10,11,12,13] which concluded that time for faculty research was reduced due to a heavy workload
Summary
Ongoing high quality research in the health sciences is needed in order to continue to achieve advances in patient care. Green [2] estimated that it takes 17 years for an issue to go from a research priority to incorporation into clinical practice, so a reduction in health-related research today will be detrimental to the generation’s healthcare quality. It is important for health science universities to facilitate research productivity among academic faculty. The purpose of this study was to examine barriers to research among academic faculty at a public university health sciences center in the United States and to investigate how these barriers are related to faculty member characteristics
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