Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Scholarly activity and scholarly productivity are key features of the academic health center (AHC) and the work of college of medicine faculty. Recent changes in the academic environment of the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Medicine led to an examination of its appointment, promotion, and tenure procedures. ⋯ The authors describe some of the new procedures being implemented to address these challenges; these include new faculty designations, clearer articulation of promotion procedures, explicit recognition of multiple forms of scholarship, expectations for investment in junior faculty, and mandatory discussion of faculty success in chairs' annual reviews. Faculty reactions, positive and negative, to these changes in procedures are also presented.
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Academic medicine and research universities have enjoyed a close relationship that has strengthened both, spawning an era of discovery and scholarship in medicine that has earned the U. S. academic medical enterprise a high level of public trust and a deserved leadership position in the world. However, changes in the financing of medical care and in the organization of health care delivery have dramatically affected the medical school-university partnership. ⋯ As a corollary, the university, through its medical school, must provide these faculty the time and the financial support necessary to fulfill their academic mission. The size of the clinician-educator faculty should be determined by the academic needs of the medical school rather than by the service demands of its associated health care delivery system. To accomplish this, academic medical centers will have to develop cadres of associated or clinical faculty whose primary focus is on the practice of medicine.
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The Association of American Medical Colleges' Council of Academic Societies (CAS) has a long-standing interest in scholarship as it relates to research, education, and service, the traditional definition of the activities of medical school. The work of Ernest Boyer and Charles Glassick is highly respected for redefining scholarship and conceiving how scholarship as thus defined can be assessed. Because their ideas have been applied in other areas of the academy but not widely in medical faculties, the CAS Task Force on Scholarship collected a special set of papers on Boyer's four areas of scholarship as applied to medical school, including case studies and the perspective from the university. ⋯ The scholarship of discovery-research-has for decades been the primary focus for promotion and tenure for medical school faculty, even though the faculty also had major and critical activities in the other areas of scholarship. The CAS hopes that the ideas put forth in this special theme issue will produce a continuing dialogue as faculty and administrators at medical schools reflect on the value of these different forms of scholarship, their application by medical school faculty, and their contributions to the individual missions of each medical school and teaching hospital. In addition, these articles will stimulate continuing discussions that will definite equitable methods for the continued assessment of the scholarly accomplishments of medical school faculty.
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To compare the results of academic promotion to associate professor and professor via the teaching pathway at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM) with the criteria of the "educators' pyramid" of Sachdeva et al. ⋯ The findings suggest that the educators' pyramid is generalizable to medical faculty being promoted on a teaching pathway at WFUSM. Documentation of achievement in teaching criteria is essential and faculty should be encouraged to maintain records of accomplishment before becoming candidates for promotion.