Increasing the number of clinician scientists has become a national science policy strategy in Germany. In order to remain a clinician scientist within this differentiated system of university medicine, clinician scientists have to do a significant amount of extra work. The tasks clinician scientists perform in research remain separate from patient care and teaching, thus, limiting their translational potential. CSPs support the initial development of the clinician scientist’ role, but not in a sustainable way, because the separation of research and patient care is stabilized on an institutional and systemic level. After the programs, however, the career paths remain unstable, mainly due to a lack of target positions for clinician scientists. We find that CSPs improve working conditions for the duration of the program and provide protected time for doing research. Third, there is a need for cultural change within university medicine that recognizes and rewards new translation-focused practices. Second, a stable career path requires new target positions besides clinic management and senior residency. Protection from the urgency of patient care and from metrics-based performance measures both in the clinic and in research seem key here. We found three types of challenges for establishing and ensuring long term career paths for clinician scientists: First, local working conditions need to allow for clinician scientists to create and perform tasks that combine research, teaching, patient care and translation synergistically. The goal of the interviews was to identify the key obstacles in establishing a career path for clinician scientists in Germany. We developed a qualitative questionnaire and interviewed 36 clinician scientists in training, their program supervisors, as well as policy stakeholders. MethodsÄuring a research project that was conducted from 2020 to 2023 and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, we studied thirteen CSPs. Against the backdrop of an increasing number of CSPs, our study provides early insights into their effectiveness with a focus on what it means to become a clinician scientist and to establish a subsequent career path as a clinician scientist in Germany. The implementation of nationwide clinician scientist programs (CSPs) in Germany is supposed to solve the lack of trained clinician scientists and, as consequence, to improve the translational relationship between biomedical research and clinical practice. This problem is widely acknowledged, not just in Germany, as clinician scientists are crucial for medical translation and innovation: trained in medical practice and research they are capable of translating scientific problems into clinical application and vice versa, clinical problems into research. Germany faces a lack of clinician scientists.
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