PNN calls upon peripheral hospitals to start recognizing and registering PhD candidates

The past years, non-academic hospitals have increasingly started to focus on research. Though an increasing number of employees within these ‘peripheral’ hospitals are working part time or full time on (biomedical) research, good representation of this group has been lacking. To understand the composition of this growing group of PhD candidates and which challenges they encounter, PNN’s workgroup National consultation UMC PhD candidates (LOUP) distributed a questionnaire in this group. Several bottlenecks came to light, stemming from a lack of harmonisation, registration and recognition of this group. In this position paper, PNN calls upon peripheral hospitals to start recognising and registering the PhD candidate as a separate position and to include this position in the new collective labour agreement. Read our full position here.