UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

College of Medicine

Iowa City, Iowa

Team Contact/Coordinator: Marcy Rosenbaum, Ph.D.

E-mail: marcy-rosenbaum@uiowa.edu

Phone: 319/335-8612

Fax: 319/335/8904

Faculty Development Needs to Address at the Models That Work Conference

We want to meet the development needs of faculty in a multidisciplinary primary care training site for residents. Participation will help use approach us approach challenges of enhancing teaching in an increasingly stressful academic healthcare environment.

Preliminary Needs Assessment Plan

The University of Iowa has recently established a unique facility, the Family Care Center (FCC), in which General Internal Medicine, General Pediatrics and Family Medicine provide comprehensive primary care. The FCC is unique among academic health centers in that it integrates the delivery of care by the three primary care disciplines in a single administrative structure and physical environment. In addition, the FCC integrates residents' ambulatory care clinics and faculty private practices and integrates delivery of behavioral health care, preventive counseling and complementary alternative medicine. Within this setting, residents in the three disciplines receive the majority of their training in ambulatory primary care. We are interested in developing an interdisciplinary model of faculty development that incorporates emerging models of patient-centered care and focuses specifically on teaching residents. This model will need to be responsive to increasing pressures on these academic faculty to increase their clinical productivity while continuing to meet institutional expectations in the areas of medical education, research, and administrative service.

While several models exist for faculty development of community-based faculty, we are in need of a model which addresses the needs of faculty in the changing academic health care setting. One of the primary faculty development needs we perceive is how to enhance teaching skills and the ability of faculty to serve as role models for trainees within the current academic health center context. Thus, anticipated topics of importance include such areas as: time management, observation, evaluation, feedback, tracking resident patient experiences, practice management, patient centered care, communication skills, and successful role modeling, all set within the context of pressures for increased clinical productivity. In addition, we need to develop an outcome-based approach to increasing resident independence of practice based on achieving specific milestones. This will need faculty development focusing on how to ascertain the achievement of these milestones and how to rapidly bring residents to the greatest level of independence possible for their level of training. Another challenge the FCC faces is enhancing integration and collaboration among the separate disciplines represented here. We see the creation of a multidisciplinary faculty development program as working toward better integration of these disciplines. Our hope is that participation in the conference and the opportunity to be a pilot team will help us face the challenges and opportunities posed by these new circumstances.

Preliminary Thoughts on Addressing These Faculty Development Needs

Addressing these faculty development needs, in our minds, will require a series of assessments and consequent interventions. Assessment of the organization of the newly established FCC in terms of how residents and physicians accomplish their clinical tasks, and how teaching can be accommodated within this structure, will be a primary consideration in the design of an effective faculty development program. Assessment and observation of faculty teaching behaviors will provide a substantive framework in which to address specific areas of teaching and time management skills.

Potential approaches to interventions to improve faculty teaching skills in the context of the FCC include: providing feedback on observed teaching behaviors; providing structured workshops and seminars on pertinent topics; and interdisciplinary problem-solving sessions to address perceived obstacles to integrating teaching into clinical care.