Success stories: exploring perceptions of former fellows of a global faculty development program for health professions educators.

BACKGROUND: Faculty development programs (FDPs) in health professions education (HPE) are instrumental in supporting, promoting, and improving HPE curricula and activities that target individual- and system-level capacity strengthening. FAIMER, a division of Intealth, has been offering FDPs for global health professions educators in HPE and leadership for over two decades through the International FAIMER Institute in the USA and FAIMER Regional Institutes located globally. This paper explores perceptions of former program participants (Fellows) of FAIMER global FDPs by eliciting their success stories. METHODS: The study utilized a modified Success Case Method approach. Study participants recruited were 14 FAIMER Fellows nominated as exemplars of success cases by program directors and faculty members from seven global sites, using extreme case sampling technique. Of the 14 Fellows, two were from Africa, nine from Asia and three from Latin America. In-depth interviews were conducted with each Fellow to understand their self-perceived success, and factors from both their local context and FAIMER's FDPs that have contributed to their success. Theoretical thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: The top three areas of success perceived by Fellows were career advancement & recognition, professional development, and advancement of HPE. Fellows identified both institutional-level factors and personal attributes as contributing to their success. They also reported that FAIMER global FDPs have substantially contributed to their success by expanding professional networks, fostering academic achievement, and enhancing interpersonal development and leadership skills. CONCLUSIONS: The findings show that Fellows perceive that there are multiple pathways for them to succeed in advancing the field of HPE. The Fellows' stories highlight the continuing value of FAIMER global FDPs for HPE educators worldwide in professional development and leadership. The study also proposes recommendations for enhancing faculty development activities in HPE.

FAIMER Global Faculty Development: A Sustainable Partnership Model to Advance Health Professions Education.

The Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research (FAIMER), a member of Intealth, offers longitudinal faculty development programs (LFDPs) in health professions education (HPE) and leadership through its International FAIMER Institute (IFI) in the United States and FAIMER Regional Institutes (FRIs) globally. FAIMER fosters mutual collaboration and delineates shared responsibilities for FRI development in partnership with local institutions, using an adapted hub-and-spoke organizational design. This paper describes FAIMER's model, its sustainability, and its impacts at individual, institutional, and national levels. IFI was launched in 2001 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a 2-year part-time hybrid LFDP; with the COVID-19 pandemic onset, IFI transitioned to a fully online program. Since FAIMER's launch, 11 FRIs developed in Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, each modeled on the IFI curriculum and adapted to local context. The more than 1,600 IFI and FRI graduates (fellows) from over 55 countries now form a global community of health professions educators who have shared exposure to HPE methods and assessment, leadership and management, educational scholarship and research, and project management and evaluation. Across all global locations and program formats, fellows self-reported a similar increase in knowledge and skills in HPE. All programs center on the fellows' institutional projects as experiential learning; these projects have focused primarily on educational methods and curriculum revisions. An increased quality of education was reported as the top impact resulting from fellows' projects. As a result of these programs, fellows have influenced education policy in their countries and established academic societies for HPE, thus contributing to recognition of the HPE academic specialty. FAIMER has successfully developed a sustainable model for advancing HPE globally, creating a vibrant network of health professions educators who have influenced country-specific educational policy and practice. FAIMER's model offers one approach to building global capacity in HPE.

Using a theory of change for evaluation: has the FAIMER international faculty development program improved the field of health professions education?

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Program theories have not been extensively used in evaluating faculty development programs in medical education. Ample evidence shows that a well-formulated program theory plays a pivotal role in program implementation and evaluation. Program theory links activities and expected outcomes using a logical process showing how they lead to long-term goals. It also develops appropriate metrics or indicators for assessing if those outcomes and activities really occurred. In this study, FAIMER's theory of change was adopted as a framework for evaluation. Survey data from FAIMER Fellows was used to assess the effectiveness of FAIMER's faculty development program in meeting the goal of improving health professions education. We used structural equation modeling to examine the association among outcomes mapped out in our theory of change and their association with improving field of health professions education. The study results indicated that FAIMER's faculty development program appeared to have positively influenced advancement of multiple facets of health professions education as envisaged in our theory of change. Using a theoretical framework for evaluating a program helped us identify the specific areas of outcomes that need to be strengthened for program improvement as well as provided us with a data-driven evaluation framework to measure program progress.