India has some of the highest cancer rates in the world

Assessment system in Britain is failing medical research 123, 365, 134 The future of medical research in UK universities is under severe threat, because the "one size fits all" approach to allocating funding in higher education fails to take account of the nature of clinical research, the BMA warned last week.The government's research assessment exercise, the system used to rate university departments on their research output and to allocate future funding, is "biased" against medical research, says the BMA, with generally lower ratings awarded to medical disciplines than to non-medical subjects, such as veterinary sciences.The assessment criteria rank UK medical research only 30th in the world, despite the fact that the United Kingdom is second to the United States in terms of international output.This has sparked funding cuts for all but the highest rated university departments.The number of academic departments of anaesthesia in London has fallen from 12 in 1997 to only three, and more than a quarter of all academic posts in psychiatry have been cut.