Milestones as a Faculty Development Tool for Career Academic Physicians.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has implemented milestones for progression of residents. Career academic physicians would benefit from similar concrete guidance for scholarly activity and faculty development. After developing milestones across six recognized competencies among our family medicine academicians, we acknowledged the potential benefit of expanding the development of milestones throughout the academic medical center. METHODS: Milestones that we previously developed were modified by departmental leaders within our institution reflecting levels of career development based on benchmarks in each field. These objective measures for guiding maturation of clinical and academic skill sets were then circulated to clinicians in five residency programs throughout our academic medical center for self-evaluation. We analyzed the completed surveys to determine if an association exists between years in academics and rank across each area of competency. RESULTS: We received fifty-three responses from the 91 faculty invited. We noted a significant association in the competency of medical knowledge with progression from assistant to full professor, and we noted a trend toward significance in professionalism and progression from assistant to full professor. These objective measures of clinician development and competency suggest association with levels of academic career development by rank within the institution. CONCLUSIONS: This rubric can be helpful for directing faculty development and faculty mentorship. These milestones are general enough that other physician specialties may be able to adopt them for their own needs.

Milestones as a Guide for Academic Career Development.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Faced with a limited supply of applicants for faculty positions, increasing demands for residency faculty, and a growing number of programs, our program has increasingly filled ranks with recent residency graduates with broad scope but limited experience and training in academics. These early-career clinicians often require further mentorship as they seek advancement in clinical skills and development of teaching and scholarly activity skill sets. METHODS: To educate our recent residency graduates in teaching/scholarly activity skills, and to provide a career trajectory, we created a process to guide their maturation with milestones using the six core competencies from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The milestones consist of four levels of clinician/academician maturation. Each competence has goals and activities for each level of development. We validated the milestones using our physician faculty assessing time spent in academic medicine and academic rank. RESULTS: Faculty of higher academic rank scored higher in all competencies than faculty of lower academic rank. Correlation between systems-based practice and years in academics demonstrated statistical significance, and all other categories showed nonsignificant associations. CONCLUSIONS: The milestones are consistent with faculty academic development and career progression, and may serve as a guide for career advancement and as a guideline for professional progression for residency clinicians. Further testing for validation in other family medicine programs is necessary, but preliminary findings indicate this milestone project may be of service to our profession.