Research hospitals in Boston have been hit with a double whammy; the combination of lower payments from medical insurers on the clinical side, with declining funding from the NIH on the research side, has made life tough at places like Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of Harvard’s affiliated hospitals.
Not only has BIDMC laid off people and cut/freeze salaries, but now it’s also reducing its research space by about 11 percent, according to the Globe. Hospitals, especially the big-name ones like those affiliated with Harvard, enjoyed the riches of ballooning NIH budgets of the 1990s and early 2000s and expanded their research facilities, perhaps a little too much, but now are suffering as they can’t afford to maintain them.
There’s been some temporary relief from Obama’s stimulus plan, but still, BIDMC’s share likely won’t be enough to close its $28 million gap. Plus, that money must be spent by 2010…and then what? Will biomedical researchers and institutions ever get out of these boom-bust cycles they seem to be caught in?
At a US Senate hearing yesterday, the chairing senator, Tom Harkin, suggested that the NIH stimulus money should perhaps be exempted from the ‘spend-in-two-years’ rule and should instead be spread out over 4 years.
Harking has a good point, although that still may prove to be yet another band-aid on the far greater problem that you refer to here. As a community, scientists and administrators need to figure out how to square available research dollars, not only with current and projected needs but also with graduate school accept rates. Until some big changes are made in science education in this country, we are going to continue to have more jobs than there are scientists and all the economic ills associated with that will perpetuate.
*Harkin