Background:
Early career faculty often face challenges in setting personal and professional expectations, identifying effective mentorship, and quickly learning foundational skills in academic hospital medicine. We developed a “Faculty Boot Camp” to better orient new faculty at the beginning of the academic year with the goal of introducing them to key skills and concepts that might help them be more effective early career faculty.
Purpose:
To create a “Faculty Boot Camp” to orient new faculty to key concepts in medical education, clinical care, and scholarship, and to promote community and mentorship.
Description:
The chairs of our hospitalist group’s faculty development committee planned and led a two-day “Faculty Boot Camp” held September 2015. The objectives of the boot camp were to orient newly hired faculty to the Division, to introduce them to key priorities within academic hospital medicine, and expose them to mentors within the group. Experienced hospitalists and group leaders were recruited to lead individual sessions. Figure 1 outlines the key domains covered by the boot camp and examples of individual sessions.
Participants in the boot camp were newly hired faculty and hospital medicine fellows in the Division. Most participants had not yet started clinical responsibilities. The Division of Hospital Medicine provided support materials, administrative support, food, meeting space, and clinical coverage if needed, for a total cost of $1850.
Eight of the nine new faculty/fellow participants completed an anonymous online survey. Survey respondents unanimously recommended the “Faculty Boot Camp” to future new faculty (8/8, 100%) and commented that the boot camp fostered a sense of community. All sessions were rated between very good and excellent, with an average score of 4.5 on a 5 point Likert scale. The most popular didactic session was “Defining Success: Setting Career Expectations” (5) and the most popular activity was “Observing Attending Rounds” (4.8).
Conclusions:
A “Faculty Boot Camp” onboarded new faculty and taught core concepts our group felt were important to early career hospitalists. A “boot camp” model of faculty development can be an efficient way to orient new hires, promote camaraderie, and teach foundational skills in academic hospital medicine.