ReseaRch Quality assuRance foR the futuRe a ... - Lund University

Panel 11 – medicine | health sciences
new sustainable educational programmes, which themselves have the additional
demands of preparing graduates for professional practice. These
programmes have recently been appraised as very high quality, not a
common achievement in departments which have had to simultaneously
build up their research infrastructure.
The productivity is fair, and certainly compares very favourably with similar
departments throughout Europe, however the department still has some
way to go to bring some of their research to the international level. The
base platform has now been built, paving the way for increased publication
rates and more external research grants. There are obvious concerns such as
reduced numbers of FTE- research students in recent years, and the need to
limit expansion through enhanced departmental management.
The panel thought that there are too many research areas, and the
department is advised to create a more coherent strategy for the future
with even more collaboration. However, collaboration is already at an
unusually high level. The gender balance is the opposite to the usual, with
women predominating, due to the nature of the gender balance of the
professions represented in the department. This provides an opportunity
for the university to demonstrate that it can develop policies specifically
to support females to reach and sustain their academic potential.
The broad visions and strategies for the future at the medical faculty level
have been described in two recent documents. The submission from the
head of the department maps the current situation and also presents ideas
about and approaches for strengthening the research capacity, paving the
way for new research initiatives. Specific plans for future research were
however not presented. The description of the total research profile of the
department is repeated in the description of the most successful research
areas with the strongest national or international impact, which suggests
that the management is finding it difficult to compare the different
research areas and to make decisions about its priorities.
2. Research infrastructure
The submission describes research work at the department within ten
established research areas led by principal investigators who represent different
disciplines. The logic of placing different disciplines present in the
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