Response to “The Importance of Support Staff to Research Capacity”

In their letter regarding the importance of staff support to family medicine department research capacity in response to our publication, “The Current State of Research Capacity in US Family Medicine Departments,”1 Dr Scherrer and Mr Secrest highlight the fact that “a faculty member is rarely a successful, funded investigator without the support of a highly trained and dedicated support staff” who are “the infrastructure that enables faculty to efficiently submit grants, manage grants, field studies, and disseminate research findings.” We could not agree more with these comments (and note, incidentally, that the lead author on our work is in fact a research staff person).

Our survey tool was a first attempt to systematically measure components of departmental research capacity on a national scale following a well-documented theoretical model (the Bland model).2 We limited the number of items in this survey to minimize response burden and prioritized the validation of a single-item measure of research capacity (self-assessed research capacity). The research capacity elements we chose to measure (trained research faculty, “laboratory” infrastructure, research leadership, and funding) provided both a baseline of those elements in 2015 as well as empirical validation of the single-item measure.

We plan to repeat this survey of US Departments of Family Medicine for the year 2020, and will seriously consider measuring important elements of research support staff that are so essential to research productivity in lieu of other items included in the 2015 survey.

We thank the authors for raising this important point and look forward to learning more in the future about departmental structures for the key staff roles that help support the family medicine research enterprise.