Brave new world: the AUTP survey of academic psychiatry

Extract

This brief article reports the results of a questionnaire survey of Academic Departments of Psychiatry in the UK in August 1992 initiated by the Association of University Teachers of Psychiatry (AUTP). The survey was undertaken in an effort to gauge more objectively a growing sense of anxiety within academic psychiatry, whose key functions – education, training, clinical research – seemed to many to be threatened by changes in the logistics of funding within universities and the NHS. These changes include the introduction of the internal market in the NHS, changes in the funding from the Universities Funding Council (UFC) and the service increment for teaching and research (SIFTR), ever stiffer competition for research grants, changing funding patterns for clinical research with the Peckham initiative, and, for the ten London departments, the Tomlinson report.