Top emergency medicine faculty development papers since 2000: A Delphi study

Faculty development is essential for academic emergency physicians to maintain clinical skills and succeed in administrative and leadership roles and for career advancement and satisfaction. Faculty developers in emergency medicine (EM) may struggle to find shared resources to guide faculty development efforts in a way that builds on existing knowledge. We aimed to review the EM-specific faculty development literature since 2000 and come to a consensus about the most useful for EM faculty developers.

A database search was conducted on the topic of faculty development in EM from 2000 to 2020. After identifying relevant articles, we performed a modified Delphi process in three rounds, using a team of educators with a range of experiences with faculty development and education research, to identify articles that would be most useful to a broad audience of faculty developers.

We identified 287 potentially relevant articles on the topic of EM faculty development, 244 from the initial literature search, 42 from manual review of the references of the papers meeting inclusion criteria, and one by our study group's recommendation. Thirty-six papers met final inclusion criteria and underwent full-text review by our team. The Delphi process yielded six articles that were deemed most highly relevant over the three rounds. Each of these articles is described here, along with summaries and implications for faculty developers.

We present the most useful EM papers from the past two decades for faculty developers seeking to develop, implement, or revise faculty development interventions.