Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Medical schools are increasingly cognizant of their inability to critically evaluate faculty who support the core mission of education. To address this need, the Project on Scholarship was initiated by the Group on Educational Affairs (GEA) of the Association of American Medical Colleges. ⋯ Two major conclusions/recommendations emerged from these discussions: (1) the use of commonly accepted scholarship criteria (clear goals, appropriate methods, significant results, effective communication) provides a framework for identifying the types of evidence needed to document teaching scholarship, and (2) medical schools must create an infrastructure for promoting educational scholarship. This infrastructure must support the reliable and valid collection of evidence of educational scholarship and the continuous development of faculty as teaching scholars.
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Continuing medical education (CME) is being pressured to change in response to increasing and changing educational needs of practicing physicians, fostered by technical innovations, evolution of practice styles, and the reorganization of health care delivery. Leadership in the reform of CME falls primarily to the medical specialty societies in light of their traditional responsibilities for accrediting CME and maintaining professional standards. To address the need for reform, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1997 organized a conference to assemble CME program administrators from several medical specialties and academicians with expertise in postgraduate learning. ⋯ The authors conclude by noting the need for a more systematic and rigorously analytic approach, where CME content is determined according to assessed needs and CME is evaluated by measuring outcomes; for this to happen, CME educators and faculty must be brought up to date through training, including the use of problem-based learning. CME must also instill collegiality, interaction, and collaboration into the learning environment instead of being a solitary learning activity. Finally, CME must not only emphasize the acquisition of knowledge but also instruct physicians in the process of decision making to help them better use their knowledge as they make clinical judgments.
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Faculty members' educational endeavors have generally not received adequate recognition. The Association for Surgical Education in 1993 established a task force to determine the magnitude of this problem and to create a model to address the challenges and opportunities identified. To obtain baseline information, the task force reviewed information from national sources and the literature on recognizing and rewarding faculty members for educational accomplishments. ⋯ The task force recommended that each surgery department have within its faculty ranks a cadre of trained teachers, a few master teachers, and at least one educator. Departments with a major commitment to education should consider supporting a master educator to serve as a resource not only for the department but also for the department's medical school and other medical schools. Although this model was created for surgery departments, it is generalizable to other disciplines.