Meeting the needs of clinician-educators: An innovative faculty development community of practice

Requirements for faculty development for clinician-educators continue to increase. The number of faculty with experience delivering faculty development, however, remains limited. To overcome our deficit of faculty developers, we created a train-the-trainer programme. We recognised, however, that our plan would not meet the ultimate goal for our programme: Creating faculty developers to meet the faculty development needs of a large, dispersed system. We report on the creation and nurturing of faculty development community of practice (CoP), which we believe could be a solution for many academic systems struggling to engage busy clinicians, mature the teaching abilities of clinician educators, and meet the needs of their accrediting institutions.

We developed a faculty development CoP with a mission of promoting educational expertise and excellence and ensuring continuous growth of the members of our COP and broader faculty.

A programme evaluation was performed consisting of two elements: The impact on the organisation (workshop and learner related metrics) and the impact on the CoP members (survey). We observed notable outcomes: Delivery of high quality workshops to faculty, attainment of leadership positions, and increases in motivation, networking, skills, confidence, and opportunities available to members.

Innovations to create and sustain structured faculty development programmes for clinician-educators are needed. The development and nurturing of a CoP of faculty developers resulted in benefits both for the organisation and CoP members and may be a solution for large academic systems struggling to meet their faculty development demands.