Underfunding for Research Training and Career Development: The Impact on Family Medicine Research

The National Institutes of Health and related federal awards for research training (RT) and research career development (RCD) are designed to prepare applicants for research careers. We compared funding rates for RT and RCD for anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, neurology, obstetrics-gynecology, pathology, pediatrics, and psychiatry.

We estimated the denominator using the number of residency graduates from different specialties from 2001 to 2010 from the Association of American Medical Colleges data. For the numerator, we used published data on federally funded awards by specialty from 2011 to 2020. We also examined the correlation between RCD funding and overall research funding.

Family medicine had the lowest rate per graduating resident for RT (0.01%) and RCD (0.77%) awards among 10 specialties and was lower than the mean/median for the other nine specialties, ranging from 2.15%/1.19% and 9.83%/8.74%. We found a strong correlation between rates of RCD awards and mean federal funding per active physician, which was statistically significant (ρ=0.77, P=.0098).

Comparatively low rates for family medicine awards for RT and RCD plausibly contribute to poor federal funding for family medicine research, underscoring the need to bolster the research career pathway in family medicine.