Evolving health professions educators' work engagement in teaching while combining roles in an academic medical...

High quality professional education requires good educators who show engagement with teaching in addition to content knowledge and didactic skills. In health professions education it is common that teaching faculty combine their teaching role with roles in patient care and/or research. However, previous studies on work engagement have mainly focused on jobs as a whole and not considered people who combine roles or tasks that could have different demands. This study aims to describe how health professions educators' work engagement in teaching, in combination with research and patient care, evolved over time at an academic medical center in the Netherlands.

All teaching faculty at the center were invited to complete the same online questionnaire in 2011, 2016, and 2022, where their work engagement was measured using the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) and they rated 22 items affecting their engagement in teaching. We calculated descriptive statistics; computed engagement score means for overall work and individual task areas (teaching, research, and patient care); and compared means across groups with various task area combinations and across years. We also performed content analysis of responses to the open-ended questions in the questionnaire.

Work engagement scores overall and for each task area (teaching, research, and patient care) fluctuated over time. Job-related aspects enhancing engagement in teaching included 'autonomy' and 'appreciation.' 'Teaching about my own specialty' consistently scored high.

Teaching faculty in our center are engaged with teaching tasks and their work engagement is consistently high over time. Combining roles might be positively related to teaching engagement by maintaining balance when job demands in other tasks increase. To maintain and increase teaching engagement, organizations should focus on the provision of time, autonomy, and support to health professions educators. Teaching engagement may increase more through content knowledge and autonomy in teaching than by facilitating educational research and dissemination opportunities.