2 research outputs found
a multi-centre cross-country comparison of women in management and leadership in academic health centres in the European Union
Background Womenâs participation in medicine and the need for gender equality
in healthcare are increasingly recognised, yet little attention is paid to
leadership and management positions in large publicly funded academic health
centres. This study illustrates such a need, taking the case of four large
European centres: CharitĂ© â UniversitĂ€tsmedizin Berlin (Germany), Karolinska
Institutet (Sweden), Medizinische UniversitÀt Wien (Austria), and Oxford
Academic Health Science Centre (United Kingdom). Case The percentage of female
medical students and doctors in all four countries is now well within the
40â60% gender balance zone. Women are less well represented among specialists
and remain significantly under-represented among senior doctors and full
professors. All four centres have made progress in closing the gender
leadership gap on boards and other top-level decision-making bodies, but a
gender leadership gap remains relevant. The level of achieved gender balance
varies significantly between the centres and largely mirrors country-specific
welfare state models, with more equal gender relations in Sweden than in the
other countries. Notably, there are also similar trends across countries and
centres: gender inequality is stronger within academic enterprises than within
hospital enterprises and stronger in middle management than at the top level.
These novel findings reveal fissures in the âglass ceilingâ effects at top-
level management, while the barriers for women shift to middle-level
management and remain strong in academic positions. The uneven shifts in the
leadership gap are highly relevant and have policy implications. Conclusion
Setting gender balance objectives exclusively for top-level decision-making
bodies may not effectively promote a wider goal of gender equality. Academic
health centres should pay greater attention to gender equality as an issue of
organisational performance and good leadership at all levels of management,
with particular attention to academic enterprises and newly created management
structures. Developing comprehensive gender-sensitive health workforce
monitoring systems and comparing progress across academic health centres in
Europe could help to identify the gender leadership gap and utilise health
human resources more effectively
Investigation of GRIN2A in common epilepsy phenotypes
Recently, mutations and deletions in the GRIN2A gene have been identified to predispose to benign and severe idiopathic focal epilepsies (IFE), revealing a higher incidence of GRIN2A alterations among the more severe phenotypes. This study aimed to explore the phenotypic boundaries of GRIN2A mutations by investigating patients with the two most common epilepsy syndromes: (i) idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) and (ii) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Whole exome sequencing data of 238 patients with IGE as well as Sanger sequencing of 84 patients with TLE were evaluated for GRIN2A sequence alterations. Two additional independent cohorts comprising 1469 IGE and 330 TLE patients were screened for structural deletions (>40. kb) involving GRIN2A. Apart from a presumably benign, non-segregating variant in a patient with juvenile absence epilepsy, neither mutations nor deletions were detected in either cohort. These findings suggest that mutations in GRIN2A preferentially are involved in genetic variance of pediatric IFE and do not contribute significantly to either adult focal epilepsies as TLE or generalized epilepsies