Educational Development for New GME Programs at Community Hospitals: Process, Outcomes and Recommendations

Changes in the U.S. healthcare system have led to graduate medical education (GME) programs expanding beyond academic medical centers to community hospitals. Direct-care physicians at these hospitals are now responsible for supervising trainees, requiring them to develop new skills in education. This article describes how our educational development office collaborated with community hospital GME program directors to pilot faculty development programming to integrate community hospital physicians into trainee education.

We met with program directors for two GME community programs, reviewed topics that would be most helpful to clinicians who are unfamiliar with education, and organized workshops to prepare them for their expanded role. Workshops were facilitated at the respective hospital locations and recorded for future reference. We administered surveys after each session and interviewed program directors to evaluate the workshops' impact.

Overall, we conducted a total of 14 one-hour workshops. Program director interview results showed buy-in from faculty members regarding learning how to be effective teachers. Faculty also expressed greater confidence in engaging with learners after the workshops. Some areas of improvement were increased awareness and promotion of session offerings and the integration of clinician co-presenters.

By engaging GME program directors at community hospitals in creating educational development programs for their faculty, we provided crucial support to build teaching capacity for direct-care physicians. This blueprint provides guidance for others to more quickly implement educational training for direct-care physicians and is relevant for other independent academic medical centers seeking ways to support their community hospitals with new GME programs.