To Teach or Not to Teach: Incentives and Barriers Impacting Clinical Preceptorship in Family Medicine

Clinical preceptors serve a vital role in medical education. Recruiting and retaining clinical preceptors, especially in family medicine, is a growing challenge for US medical schools. This study aimed to investigate the incentives and barriers family physicians at the University of Colorado School of Medicine (CUSOM) face when deciding to serve as clinical preceptors, and to explain why these physicians become, remain, and/or stop serving as preceptors.

A cross-sectional survey was distributed to 376 family physicians associated with CUSOM who were active clinical teachers, had been clinical teachers in the past, or were associated with practices that historically had taken medical student learners, with a 60.6% response rate. We calculated descriptive statistics for single-choice, closed-ended survey questions. For the open-ended questions, we adopted a thematic analysis.

The results revealed that intrinsic motivators, such as a love for teaching (76.6%), a sense of duty to the profession (67.8%), and relationships with students (58.5%) were the primary reasons that preceptors chose to teach clinically. Conversely, time (an extrinsic factor), was the largest barrier to teaching that current (80.0%) and potential (51.3%) preceptors faced.

Our results indicate that family physicians largely balance intrinsic motivators against extrinsic barriers when deciding whether to clinically precept medical students. While a longitudinal integrated clerkship model can amplify the impact of these intrinsic motivators, addressing the preceptor shortage may require focus on the motivators that preceptors report as most meaningful and minimizing the impact of the time burden of teaching.