Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Clinician Investigator Program
Clin Invest Med 1997;20(4):261
The remarkable success of the SSP in attracting highly qualified individuals and keeping them in academic medicine has attracted national interest and resulted in the program being "generalized" to the newly established Royal College Clinician Investigator Program (CIP).
The major goal of the CIP is to assist in the career development of clinician investigators in Canada by providing a formal postgraduate educational program that fulfils the existing clinical specialty/subspecialty training requirements of the Royal College and provides, in addition, a minimum of 2 years of structured, rigorous research training. It is recognized that 2 years of research training is usually insufficient to embark on a career as a medical scientist, but individuals who complete the program should have a solid grounding in research and, with additional career-specific research experience, may become independent investigators.
Health research includes, for the purposes of this program, not only the traditional areas of laboratory and clinical biomedical research, but also economics and management, and social, behavioural and information sciences as they apply to health and disease.
This new program does not imply the creation of a new Royal College specialty or subspecialty, but rather identifies a new training stream with specific objectives and requirements. The stream leads to Royal College recognition upon satisfactory completion of both the clinical and research components of that program. The program is available to residents enrolled in Royal College specialty or subspecialty residency programs in Canadian medical schools who have demonstrated an interest in and potential for a career as a clinician investigator.
Each faculty of medicine is eligible to apply for the Royal-College-approved CIP. The University of Toronto has chosen to link the CIP with a requirement for graduate studies; i.e., registrants in the University of Toronto CIP who do not hold a graduate degree enrol in a graduate program leading to an MSc or PhD degree and must fulfil the admission requirements of the participating graduate unit. Qualified applicants who have already completed a PhD (e.g., graduates of an MD/PhD program) may enter the CIP as a postdoctoral fellow. CIP participants must conduct a minimum of 2 years of full-time research study. The CIP provides an opportunity to integrate research and clinical care to add to their previous research experience in an appropriate mentoring environment. To facilitate this integration, participants are expected to:
- register in the CIP as early as possible (facilitating the identification of a research supervisor and application to an appropriate graduate program);
- maintain research involvement while in clinical training and vice versa;
- ensure that the research Program Advisory Committee includes a clinical mentor to ensure that the expectations of both research and clinical components are met;
- receive regular evaluation of the success of this integration from the Program Advisory Committee.
CIP participants are closely evaluated and monitored throughout their degree program to ensure that they meet the Royal College objectives for the CIP. Completion of a graduate degree does not automatically ensure completion of the CIP research component. The Faculty CIP Committee reviews each individual graduate degree program to ensure that Royal College standards and objectives are met.
At present, 50 trainees are registered in the University of Toronto CIP. Of these, 74% are in a MSc program and 25% in a PhD program; 72% are male and 26% are female; 90% are in the IMS, 2% in physiology, 4% in the community health/epidemiology program and 4% in the community health/clinical epidemiology program. By specialty/subspecialty, 4% are in anesthesia, 4% in community medicine, 2% in obstetrics and gynecology, 2% in ophthalmology, 2% in radiation oncology, 2% in pediatrics, 8% in psychiatry, 4% in medicine specialties/subspecialties and 72% in surgical specialties/subspecialties.
The major criticism of the CIP is that there is too little flexibility -- in particular with respect to maximizing the time allowed for research within the specialty/subspecialty programs. Dr. Eliot Phillipson addresses this issue in an attempt to maximize research time during postgraduate medical training at the University of Toronto.
