obsession with lacklustre science.

The clinician – scientist is a rare

and brilliant unicorn and represents a

combined aptitude that is impossible

to manufacture at scale. Yet, in a

desperate rush to quantify excellence, we have treated this outlier as the mandatory standard, turning a noble ideal into a professional chokehold on the very people we need

PICTURE CREDIT

most at the bedside.

We have built a system that treats

the act of healing as insufficient

and the production of forgettable

data as the only valid currency for

promotion.

I want the doctor who looks

after my family to be an expert in

clinical medicine, a master of the

physical exam, a keen interpreter of

subtle symptoms and a steady hand

in a crisis.

These are skills honed through

repetition, presence and a relentless

volume of patient encounters. They

are the result of thousands of hours

spent watching how a disease moves through a human body, not how it looks on a graph.

Associate Professor Vinay Rane.

Yet, the current‘ publish or

perish’ mandate forces these gifted

They were too busy at the bedside,

We already have exceptional

reluctant, average submissions.

By making research a mandatory

clinicians out of the consulting

too committed to the craft of care, and

researchers with medical back-

Furthermore, we must face a mod-

discriminator, we risk filtering

room and into the laboratory, where

we punched them for it.

grounds, individuals with a

ern reality, which is that the greatest

out the people who possess the

they spend months wading through

We have traded a generation of

natural gift for both the ward and the

breakthroughs of the next decade will

diagnostic grit and the essential soft

administrative sludge to draft posters

likely come from technology whiz

skills that patients actually need.

for conferences they have no desire to attend.

We are effectively taxing them for their clinical focus, forcing them to pay in time and energy for the priv-

We are exiling our most empathetic healers because they refuse to play at being part-time academics.

kids, the data scientists and algorithm experts who understand computational power in ways a medical degree simply does not cover.

These specialists possess the

We are signalling to the next generation that the vital work of saving a life is worth less than a line on a CV. It is time to decouple clinical progression from academic output.

ilege of continuing to treat patients.

tools to solve the big data puzzles

Let the real innovators and vision-

We have all encountered that one

master clinicians for a mountain of for-

workbench. As a clinician, my job is

of modern pathology. By forcing

aries pursue the breakthroughs, and

doctor, with diagnostic instinct, who

gettable PDFs and conference

to respect their expertise by imple-

every doctor to play at being pre-

let the clinicians focus on the cure.

stays late to talk a family through a terminal diagnosis but who somehow‘ missed out’ on their specialist training program.

posters, effectively exiling our most empathetic healers because they refuse to play at being part-time academics.

This mandatory dabbling is a period

menting their high-quality findings into practice.

When we force every doctor to produce noise, we dilute the sig-

tend researchers, we ask them to do a secondary job that other minds are already doing better.

There is a profound, understated

Associate Professor Vinay Rane is an obstetrician, gynaecologist and lawyer, based in Melbourne.

When you pull back the curtain,

of forced deskilling that also under-

nal of the experts. We create a clut-

virtue in being an exceptional

the reason is almost always the same: they did not‘ have enough research’.

mines the work of those who are actually good at it.

tered landscape where transformative work is buried under the weight of

clinician. It is a pursuit that demands a lifetime of focus.

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