munich

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Berlin, which belongs to the health ministry, has undergone one of the fastest and most extensive restructuring exercises ever performed by a German research institute.

Within six months of a highly critical evaluation by the Wissenschaftsrat, Germany's science council, the RKI has flattened its hierarchical structure, slashed the number of its research departments and groups, and radically altered its role as collector and disseminator of epidemiological data.

It used consulting companies to help its 600-odd employees adapt psychologically to the changes in their working practices.

The RKI's acting director, Reinhard Kurth, says the reform should serve as a model for other ministry-owned research institutes requiring external evaluation.

The health ministry was forced to review the structure of its institutes in 1993, when information about HIV-contaminated blood failed to reach the minister, Horst Seehofer. Seehofer dissolved the ministry's public health bureau, and merged the bureau's six institutes into three — including the RKI — which are now responsible to the ministry.

The Wissenschaftsrat was asked to evaluate the three institutes. Its report, published late last year, said the RKI was performing poorly in terms of both research and other functions, including assembling epidemiological information for the ministry. It said the institute should close if it could not be radically reformed.

Kurth, who was appointed acting director in 1996, acted rapidly to address these criticisms. RKI research will now concentrate on three areas: antibiotic resistance, Borna virus infection, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The number of research groups has been cut from 53 to 10.

The RKI will also be responsible for collecting, interpreting and disseminating epidemiological data on both non-infectious and infectious diseases. It will also improve the notoriously poor quality of epidemiological data in federal Germany, where 440 authorities collect local data, and even data on diseases like measles and rubella are unreliable. The RKI will be helped by a law under discussion in parliament that will impose sanctions on doctors who do not report cases of infectious diseases.

As a result of these changes, nearly all the RKI's staff, who are employed on permanent civil-service contracts, will have to change the orientation of their jobs. They must also learn to work in a non-hierarchical environment, which the Wissenschaftsrat had recommended to increase flexibility and improve efficiency.

Kurth hired external consulting companies to run workshops to help with both the psychological and the practical aspects of the changes. The exercise has been expensive, he says, but the DM500,000 (US$290,000) so far spent on workshops was “money well spent”.

The RKI practice of employing staff on life-long contracts means that most staff are relatively old. This makes accepting changes much more difficult, says Kurth, “but it also means that we desperately need new blood to make sure the institute has a strong future”.

He has persuaded the finance ministry to pay for two young scientists' groups to be set up for five years. The ministry says it would consider adding more in the 2000 budget.

Bärbel-Maria Bellach, an east German mathematician who is director of the newly styled department of epidemiology at the RKI, says the changes were hard for the staff to cope with, but that the workshops “really helped a lot”.

She says the worst time was the three months of waiting to hear exactly what the new structure would be.

An atmosphere of suspicion remains over the distribution of jobs, admits Bellach, but younger scientists are optimistic that the institute has a good chance of becoming internationally competitive.