Funding for medical education research should not be based on anticipated improvements to patient care

Social science and humanities scholars can create fruitful and mutually challenging opportunities for collaborative work with health professions, but forcing their endeavours into an exclusively biomedical view of what constitutes fundable research threatens to limit the benefits they can offer. 2 Funding should be given to robust, important, and creative research, not solely on the basis of anticipated improvements to patient care, but because it asks hard questions and provides theory driven insights that may result in deeper understanding, radical challenges, or new innovations in medical education.