Background: Academic hospitalist faculty often feel poorly equipped to meet the variety of teaching and scholarship expectations placed on them. This can contribute to job dissatisfaction and burnout. There is a dearth of faculty development programs for hospital medicine faculty to meet this need. We developed, implemented, and evaluated a faculty development workshop series for our 80 adult and pediatric academic hospitalist faculty using Kern’s 6 steps of curriculum design.
Methods: Our adult hospitalists are housed in the sections of hospital medicine and perioperative medicine in the department of medicine, and our pediatric hospitalists are based in the department of pediatrics. Two hospitalists, one from each department, collaborated to conduct a needs assessment of all hospitalist faculty members and hospitalist and educational leaders at our institution. The survey was divided into 5 sections: demographics, teaching needs, career development needs, barriers to teaching and learning style preferences. Sixty-five percent (52/80) of hospitalists responded to the 24-item needs assessment questionnaire. A series of 8 one-hour monthly workshops were designed based on the results of the needs assessment survey and delivered over a period of 6 months (table 1). Session 7 and 8 had to be canceled to meet clinical deployment needs when COVID19 pandemic struck. Workshop sessions consisted of a brief didactic presentation, followed by demonstration, with time left for practice, role play and discussion at the end. For example, facilitators demonstrated on how to deliver an effective mini-lecture during session 2, and faculty participants practiced delivering a mini-lecture during subsequent sessions. Facilitators and peers provided feedback. Similarly, facilitators demonstrated how to provide feedback to learners in session 1, and faculty participants deployed role play to practice giving feedback to each other using scripts. Single group pre and post-test survey of participant perception was used as the evaluation design. Nine domains that were covered by the educational objectives of the 8 workshop sessions were assessed on the pre-post surveys.
Results: Fifty-one hospitalists responded to the baseline survey. Up to 35% (18/51) of faculty reported inadequate preparedness with the various aspects of functioning as an effective educator at the bedside. When asked about career development, 33% (17/51) of respondents reported not having a 5-year career development plan, and 43% (22/51) did not know the next steps they needed to take to get promoted. A total of 40 hospitalists participated in workshops. Fourteen (47%) hospitalists responded to the post workshop surveys. Forty three percent (6/14) attendees “strongly agreed” and 50% (7/14) attendees “somewhat agreed” that their teaching skills improved after attending the workshop series. Survey results showed improvement in all 9 domains which were addressed during workshop series (figure 1). Comparisons are underpowered to detect statistically significant differences due to low response rate on the post-session survey.
Conclusions: Our workshop series was well received with a high proportion of the faculty attending at least one workshop. We plan to repeat this workshop series as part of our onboarding for new faculty on an annual basis. Our experience can help guide other groups as they develop their own faculty development programs.
