Attitudes of part-time community internal medicine faculty about their teaching

The authors sent a six-item questionnaire regarding attitudes about teaching to 130 part-time community internal medicine faculty at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford in August 1991; of the 90 (69%) who responded, 53 were salaried and 37 nonsalaried. Substantial numbers of the salaried faculty responded (1) that teaching is important for their career development (25, 48%), compared with nine (22%) of the nonsalaried faculty, and (2) that they expected to increase their commitments to the medical school (50, 75%), compared with 24 (65%) of the nonsalaried faculty. Of all the faculty, fewer than the authors expected--22 (24%)--felt that their teaching interfered with their clinical practices. As expected, most (76, 84%) responded that salary was necessary. The authors suggest that their results may be helpful to other medical schools, because with the setting of medical education changing from the hospital to the community, the importance of part-time faculty is increasing.