Evaluating Faculty Workload as a "Must-Have" for Addressing Curricular Overload

Faculty in health sciences often juggle multiple competing priorities related to teaching, scholarship, service, and clinical practice. This may lead to the prioritization of certain duties at the expense or delay of others, especially when tasked with addressing significant educational disruptors, such as curriculum overload, in addition to routine responsibilities. From our own experience in a college of pharmacy addressing curriculum overload in a large integrated pharmacotherapy course, we learned that to be successful in implementing change, it is critical to address barriers to faculty engagement. Paradoxically, these same barriers make this process inherently more complicated. A potential solution is to account for efforts related to addressing significant educational disruptors in faculty workload estimations, which may help avoid burnout. Using curriculum overload as a case study for significant educational disruptors, this commentary explores how redefining teaching workload to account for problem-solving, collaboration, and the implementation of innovative solutions to contemporary teaching challenges may result in sustained faculty well-being (rather than burnout) while maintaining high-quality Doctor of Pharmacy programs.