Societal output and use of research performed by health research groups

The last decade has seen the evaluation of health research pay more and more attention to societal use and benefits of research in addition to scientific quality, both in qualitative and quantitative ways. This paper elaborates primarily on a quantitative approach to assess societal output and use of research performed by health research groups (societal quality of research). For this reason, one of the Dutch university medical centres (i.e. the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC)) was chosen as the subject of a pilot study, because of its mission to integrate top patient care with medical, biomedical and healthcare research and education. All research departments were used as units of evaluation within this university medical centre