Work

A Comprehensive Comparison of PSF and NIH Funding

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: PURPOSE: Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery is one of the least funded medical subspecialties by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has been for some time. One of the stated goals of the Plastic Surgery Foundation (PSF) is to fund new plastic surgery researchers and projects and improve the proliferation of future studies in the field. By doing this, the PSF is creating a foundation that can support future grant applications to the NIH for larger projects. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comparison of the grants the PSF has funded to plastic surgery related grants the NIH has funded. Aided by this analysis, plastic surgery researchers can use the findings from this study to improve the odds of accessing further funding from the NIH. METHODS: For the NIH grants, the NIH RePORTER database was queried with the names of all American Society of Plastic Surgery (ASPS) members between 2003 to 2024. The abstracts from the resulting grants were then manually read and identified as to whether the grant was related to plastic and reconstructive surgery. The abstracts were then manually categorized into the same categories the PSF uses. A second pass was completed by another researcher to ensure validity of manual data collection and categorization. For the PSF grants, the topic data as well as the number of grants under each topic was manually extracted from the PSF archive of funded grants from 2003 to 2024. Chi square tests were then performed between the number of grants awarded by the PSF and NIH. RESULTS: NIH and PSF funded grant topics were compared with Chi Square tests. The NIH was 0.606 times as likely to fund reconstructive or cosmetic breast related grants as the PSF, 0.204 times as likely to fund composite tissue allotransplantation related grants; 4.951 times as likely to fund cranio/maxillofacial/head and neck related grants; 2.747 times as likely to fund fat grafting related grants; 0.577 times as likely to fund hand or upper extremity grants; 0.089 times as likely to fund technology based grants; and 5.687 times as likely to fund wound or scar related grants. CONCLUSION: Researchers who wish to use PSF grants as a stepping stone to gain more funding from the NIH may consider focusing their grants on cranio/maxillofacial/head and neck, fat grafting, and wound/scar related topics.

Source: Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Global Open

DOI: 10.1097/01.gox.0001063992.26511.90