A systematic policy review of faculty development valuation in health professions education

Continuous professional development is essential for maintaining teaching excellence in health professions education. However, the extent to which faculty development is valued in high-stakes personnel decisions remains unclear. This study conducted a comprehensive systematic review of the seven core health professions to determine how participation in faculty development is codified and incentivized within advancement, promotion, and tenure (APT) policies.

A definitive study population (N = 3,101) was established using official accreditation directories for dentistry, medicine (MD/DO), nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy, and physician assistant programs in the United States. We employed a comprehensive, automated data harvesting pipeline to retrieve public policy documents via the Google Custom Search API. Following PRISMA guidelines, an automated content refinery filtered the dataset to 10,850 valid policy documents. Thematic analysis quantified the prevalence of faculty development terminology and requirements.

Text analysis of the final corpus identified 29,812 unique policy excerpts related to faculty development. The most dominant themes were Process/Requirement (41.5%) and General Terminology (41.4%), while Assessment requirements appeared in 13% of excerpts, and explicit Formal Structure requirements (e.g., Teaching Academies) appeared in only 4.1% of excerpts. A significant prevalence gap emerged between disciplines: Physician Assistant programs were the most likely to reference professional development (65.3%), whereas Physical Therapy programs were the least likely (11.0%). Pharmacy (28.6%) and Medicine (MD: 49.4%; DO: 32.3%) fell in the middle range.

While universities frequently reference professional development as a general value, they rarely codify it as a requirement for tenure. A systemic Input/Output Paradox exists: institutions rigorously assess teaching effectiveness (outputs) but treat the developmental activities necessary to achieve it (inputs) as voluntary resources rather than professional standards. To better align institutional values with faculty incentives, Health Professions Institutional leaders may examine their policies to ensure alignment between faculty development and promotion criteria.