Barriers to scholarship in dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy practice faculty

There has been an increased emphasis on scholarly activities by health sciences faculty members given the importance of the promotion of public health over the last 50 years. Consequently, faculty members are required to place greater emphasis on scholarly activities while maintaining their teaching and service responsibilities. This increasing requirement of scholarly activities has placed great demands on clinical practice faculty members and it has made their management of clinical practice, teaching responsibilities, and expectations for promotion and tenure a difficult task. This retrospective literature review identifies barriers to the scholarship activities of clinical faculty members in dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy and discusses strategies for enabling faculty members to pursue scholarly activities in the current health science academic environment. The review indicates commonalities of barriers across these 4 disciplines and suggests strategies that could be implemented by all of these disciplines to enable clinical practice faculty members to pursue scholarly activities.