Dr Lindsey Sinclair has spent her career pursuing breakthroughs in dementia treatment. The NHS consultant psychiatrist combines her work on hospital wards with world-leading research on the link between dementia and depression. But despite having two decades’ experience as a practising doctor, Sinclair has struggled to secure a job in Britain due to a national funding shortfall for research posts.
The mother of three is among thousands of clinical academics warning that a brain drain is putting Britain’s historical status as a major player in medical research under threat — and deterring global pharmaceutical investment, too.
Clinical academics bridge the divide between wards and laboratories, splitting their time between research, seeing patients and teaching medical students. There are about 3,000 such roles in Britain, which are jointly funded by universities and the NHS.
However, universities say they do not have enough money to employ medical academics, whose basic salaries are matched to those of NHS consultants. Redundancy schemes are running at 20 of the country’s medical schools.
The precarious job market meant Sinclair was “significantly underemployed” last year when funding for her dementia research post at the University of Bristol came to an end. “When you reach consultant level there are just very, very few jobs. It feels like you’re falling off the cliff edge,” she said.
“I know multiple people who have gone to Australia, who have gone to Canada. I just think it’s very sad. It’s a brain drain. The government have put a lot of money into training us, and that investment is leaving.”
Sinclair considered applying for vacancies in Australia, New Zealand and France, but decided she could not uproot her young family. After months of searching, she secured a post as an associate professor of old age psychiatry at the University of Southampton, requiring a four-hour daily commute.
The British Medical Association (BMA), the Academy of Medical Sciences and MPs are among those calling for government action to restore clinical academic posts. They say that £20 million of investment would halt redundancies, and that every £1 invested in medical research has been shown to deliver a return of over £13 in economic benefit.
David Strain, an NHS geriatrician and professor at the University of Exeter, said the UK had long “punched above its weight”with science and medical breakthroughs, but on the current trajectory this would soon no longer be possible. “We’ve had massive worldwide innovations that have come from relatively small labs in the UK,” Strain said. “We came out of the Covid pandemic in no small part because of UK-based research.”
He gave the example of the Recovery trial, set up by Oxford academics in NHS hospitals, which found the first effective Covid treatments and saved millions of lives globally.
British medical academics were a “highly sought after commodity” and could “walk into” research jobs abroad or with global pharmaceutical firms, Strain said.
“We always used to be the first to get any new drugs, often because the drugs were developed in the UK. We’re seeing now that new drugs are not coming here, they are not being launched here for 18 months or so after the United States, Canada or Saudi Arabia.”
Strain co-chairs the BMA’s medical academic staff committee with Dr Jonathan Gibb, a trainee psychiatrist who researches depression in cancer patients. Like many of his cohort, Gibb is considering moving overseas and said he could not see a “viable” career path in Britain without “constantly fearing redundancy”.
He added that Labour’s promise to make Britain a life sciences superpower is “entirely at risk unless the government starts to think very seriously about valuing, retaining and generating more medical academics”.
Data from the Medical School Council showed that only 3.4 per cent of NHS consultants were now clinical academics, down from 4.7 per cent in 2009. The academic workforce was also ageing due to a lack of training posts, meaning that one third were aged over 55 and nearing retirement. “If we continue this decline,” Strain said, “it’s going to be a disaster.”