There is no denying that developing young physician-scientists is challenging and fraught with uncertainty. Many experts have expressed concern about the next generation of physician-scientists because they see them as essential components of the clinical research ecosystem [11–13]. Attempting to decreasing the attrition rate of the physician-scientist pipeline, many institutions have created programs to support young physician-scientists, such as the physician-scientist training program (PSTP), medical scientist training program (MSTP), RISE act and UCLA STAR program [10, 11]. On program output, however, there is comparatively little data tracking and research. This study makes an effort to offer guidance to the program supervisor in order to optimize the structure of the Ganquan Young Star Scholar Program, which has been running for ten years.
According to this study, those who receive the funding can publish 3.55 first & corresponding author publications on average during the program, which is significantly more than average 0.19 average annual publications per hospital employee annual publications from 2011 to 2020 in our hospital. The high productivity of these young physician-scientists indicates that the funding is assisting them in pursuing their research interests. On the other hand, most of them receive at least one external funding during the program or within three years after completing this program, ensuring that these young physician-scientists can have sufficient funding and research resources in their early career pathways. Compared to the annual funding rate of NSFC is 14.25%from 2011 to 2019, 47.5% of participants received the funding successfully within three years after they finish the program. This is another compelling evidence that our program can help participants strengthen their research as well as improve their application quality [14].
Most of the respondents have a positive attitude to our program. The funding score on the opinion scale is neutral (Mean = 0, SD = 0.877), which indicates that the amount of funding levels may slightly rise. Respondents agree with our initial hypoethsis that program support may aid in their future career promotion (Mean = 1.075, SD = 1.023) and future applications for external funding and career awards (Mean = 1.250, SD = 0.776). There needs to be action taken to strengthen the mentorship’s effects as it has not yet been a crucial component of the program.
Approximately one in three participants decided to study abroad as visiting scholars during the program. The rate of being a visiting scholar is lower than what we anticipated. Due to the country boundary closure restrictions in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, participants are difficult to travel across countries, and most of them are forced to give up their visiting scholar plan. The benefits of being a visiting scholar are overwhelming and our program should continue to encourage them. There is no association between being a visiting scholar and the total number of programs they received. Also, the logistic model does not provide evidence supporting that being a visiting scholar can increase the success rate of applying NSFC. This can be explained as, after 2020 spring, most physician-scientists in China mainland can hardly travel abroad as visiting scholars, so the peer pressure hasn’t increased. We think that being a visiting scholar, if the policy permits, can still be advantages to physician-scientists in the long run. Feedbacks from visiting scholars also demonstrates the value of the experience as well. However, the funding provided for visiting scholar is insufficient, so they might have to cover some expenses by themselves. However, in light of the current circumstances, our program structure needs to be modified. Some alternative methods are recommended: 1. Temporarily retain the visiting scholar supporting fund and allow participants to use them after the program completed. 2. Modifying the plan for hosting visiting scholars to support mentorship.
This program aims to enable physician-scientists to retain their research careers. According to this study, 32.5% of them complained that maintaining a work-life balance is difficult, which suggests they may be overburdened with work. It also demonstrates that another barrier preventing physician-scientists from pursuing academic careers is the inability to strike a balance between clinical work and scientific commitment.
Our research has some limitations. The fact that we lacked a control group in our study is the biggest flaw in it. In principle, we hope this program can include all physicians in our hospital who wish to pursue medical research careers. In addition, the epidemic has prevented our project from supporting visiting scholars since 2020, which prevents us from having a deep understanding of the factor’s impact on the rise of physician-scientists. Also, we need more research to generalize our findings and follow up on their long-term results.