Relationships between Medical Universities and Educational Hospitals: A Review of Challenges

The relationship between medical universities and teaching hospitals is a challenging issue. Lack of appropriate relations can create challenges in hospital management and its various functions, such as providing services, education and research. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand the current challenges of the relationship a university of medical sciences using different stakeholders' perspectives.

For data collection, 33 semi structured in-depth interviews and one focused group discussion were conducted. The participants were selected through targeted and snowball sampling, from educational hospitals and university departments. Qualitative content analysis method using qualitative analysis software, MAXQDA, was used for analyzing data. Coding and classification of codes were done by two researchers independently.

After conceptual categorization, the obtained categories were turned into 14 sub-themes and 4 main themes of “decision and policy making”, “resource provision”,” supervision and evaluation” and “information flow”. All these themes are subsets of the main “unity” theme.

analysis of the condition and related challenges emphasized the need for a revision of the relationships between educational hospitals and university departments. According to scientific evidence, this reform should focus on decentralization in order to increase hospitals decision-making power in different aspects. Obviously, due to social responsibility of university and hospitals and the necessity of their accountability to educational expectations and therapeutic needs of the community, the university governance and supervision role should be well defined and implemented correctly.