Pros and Cons of the VA Posted on October 26, 2007 Mark S. Bauer (bio) talks about conducting research in the VA setting.

The clinical infrastructure at the VA makes a lot of research on these kind of populations very easy. There’s an electronic medical record, there’s centralized nationwide databases. I don’t know how many other people at the conference could say that their healthcare system treats eighty thousand bipolar patients a year, and that’s the number that are treated in the VA. So there’s tremendous possibility for clinical research; also health services research. Both the clinical trials dissemination research and just the large database studies and clinical description studies of real world patients.

Now what are the downsides? Well any time you work, if you’re not going to be fully in the VA, which for the last couple of years I’ve been, I’ve been kind of split my time between NIH grants and the VA to all VA, I kind of go back and forth. But if you’re not fully in the VA, anytime you set up shop at two different places it can be kind of difficult. You have two sets of IRBs to go through sometimes, you’ve got some travel time, and some university’s VAs are contiguous of the main medical centers, other times they’re a couple of blocks or a couple of miles away, so that can be an impediment.

Keeping two shops going can sometimes be difficult. Two sets of requirements in terms of, as I say, the IRBs and research committees and things like that can be difficult. But I think the pace of clinical life is sometimes a little bit slower in the VA. VAs are very busy places, take care of very sick patients, but they tend to be a little bit more contained than a lot of private sector hospitals and so there are benefits there.

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