A descriptive analysis of emergency medicine residency scholarly tracks faculty workforce

Scholarly tracks typically consist of longitudinal subspecialty-specific curricula and mentorship for residents. Roughly one in five emergency medicine (EM) residency programs offer scholarly tracks, allowing residents to explore a niche and develop skills to prepare them for their future careers. There is limited information on the faculty workforce that leads scholarly tracks. Our objective was to understand the workforce characteristics of EM track leaders, specifically their effort and compensation.

We performed a cross-sectional survey study of EM scholarly track leaders who were identified by reviewing program websites and directly contacting program coordinators. Participants completed an electronic survey consisting of multiple-choice and completion items. We calculated descriptive statistics.

There were 112 of 276 (40%) track leaders who completed the survey, including 63 (57.3%) males and 47 (42.7%) females. The mean (±SD) age was 42.6 (±7.5) years. A majority (62.5%) had completed fellowship. Participants supervise a mean of 2.6 residents per year and spend a median (range) of 7.6 (4-10.7) hours per month on track activities. A total of 57.1% of participants received no compensation for their role. Nonmonetary benefits included career satisfaction (87.6%), intellectual stimulation (76.4%), departmental recognition (41.6%), and increased scholarly productivity (33.7%). Overall, 71.7% of faculty track leaders would recommend the role to a colleague.

This study characterizes the current EM scholarly track leader workforce in terms of demographics, activities, time and effort, and compensation. It sheds light on this key educational role and on the opportunity to provide better support to faculty track leaders. These results may inform decision making of current and would-be scholarly track leaders as well as institutional leadership.