Background: Mentoring skills are valuable assets for academic medicine faculty, who support academic excellence including scholarly productivity of the next generation of physicians. But mentoring students and residents in scholarly projects is often challenged by increased clinical, administrative, research, and other educational demands on medical faculty. And since clinician educators rarely receive training on the mentoring process, they are often poorly equipped to face challenges when taking on mentoring responsibilities. We sought to explore the perception of junior faculty about mentoring learners in scholarly writings and faculty development by performing a survey of junior faculty in GIM including primary care providers and hospitalists to assess perceived benefit and barriers to mentoring scholarly projects.
Methods: A qualtrics survey was emailed to 50 assistant professors in the department of general internal medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. All of the questions in the survey were focused on obtaining the junior faculty’s perceptions of factors regarding the mentoring of medical students and residents through the process of writing and presenting scholarly projects, its benefits, and the perceived challenges and barriers. Responses were obtained on a five-point Likert scale. We performed conventional quantitative analysis on all the responses and analyzed the data as respective proportions. A comparison between the responses of those who have and have not presented case reports previously was performed using a chi-square test or Fischer exact test.
Results: Of the 34 junior faculty (30 academic hospitalist and 4 primary care track) who completed the survey, 47% said they have not mentored a medical student or resident in writing and presenting scholarly projects including case reports in regional or national meetings. Eighty-two percent of surveyed faculty had completed scholarly projects either during their medical school or residency training. Of the faculty that had mentored medical students and residents, 68% had mentored 1-3 projects, and 25% had mentored more than 6 projects. The top three perceived benefits of writing or presenting case reports included enhancing curriculum vitae (CV) (100%), building educator portfolio for promotion (94%), and improving critical thinking skills (88%). The main perceived barriers to mentorship included lack of resources or formal training for mentoring learners (85%), lack of time due to clinical and administrative responsibility (82%), and lack of knowledge about opportunities for mentorship and faculty development (79%).
Conclusions: Our study shows that Junior faculty see professional value in mentoring medical students and residents, as this can enhance their CV and their educator portfolio for promotion along with promoting scholarship for professional development. But majority of junior faculty report having not mentored medical students or residents , despite having previously completed scholarly projects during their medical or residency training. Our findings highlight the importance of developing interventions to better train junior faculty to mentor medical students and residents in writing and presenting case reports and other scholarly projects. It also suggests the need for cultivating the culture of mentorship and scholarship for continuing professional development.