Expanding Family Medicine Scholarship to All Faculty: The Minnesota Model for Harmonizing Clinical Care, Education, and Research Missions

Abstract

engaged in a 5-year transformation to expand research and scholarship opportunities to all faculty. A harmonization framework was used to integrate the 3 missions of clinical care, education, and research to ensure that research and scholarship were an ongoing focus of the department.Methods:The key elements of our transformation included as follows: (1) a general culture of inquiry, (2) harmonized leadership, ( 3) training and mentoring, and (4) infrastructure and resources. Components of each of these elements were intentionally instituted simultaneously and iteratively across the 5 years to provide robust and sustainable research and scholarship opportunities for all faculty.Results: Outputs and outcomes of the harmonized transformation indicated that clinical and research faculty publications increased, and the percentage of clinical faculty trained in research and scholarship skills increased across the 5 years.Conclusions: Important lessons learned during the harmonized transformation included the following: (1) key elements of the transformation need to be balanced as an ensemble, (2) cultural and organizational shifts take concerted effort and time, (3) embrace iteration: allow "bumps in the road" to propel the work forward, (4) transformation is financially feasible, (5) career research faculty can mutually benefit from clinical faculty engaging in scholarship, and (6) honor skepticism or disinterest and let people cultivate enthusiasm for research and scholarship rather than being forced.

Negotiating a new chair package: context and considerations

“…Connecting and harmonising the missions of the department will build a better foundation for including these specific requests and how they are all a part of your cohesive story. 8 Much of the context below is specific to faculty needs, but it is crucial to have enough support and administrative staff to help faculty perform their core duties. Staff positions can support multiple areas of the department.…”

Infrastructure Features Associated With Increased Department Research Capacity

“…We identified several candidate infrastructure features to include in the survey based upon prior literature. 5,[12][13][14][15] Among the candidate features, we chose to include those mentioned most often and those that would be available to most academic family medicine departments. Among these, five were identified as substantially within the department chair's control: including research in the department's mission statement, identifying an individual other than the chair to be responsible for departmental research, developing a standardized mechanism for accessing statistical expertise, developing a standardized mechanism for accessing grant writing expertise, and employing a PhD researcher on faculty within the department.…”

“…[1][2][3] With more prioritization of educational and clinical demands and limited resources, academic departments commonly struggle with research productivity. 4,5 This struggle is amplified within primary care specialties, in which clinical care and education are historically more valued than scholarship. [6][7][8][9][10] Academic departments and residency programs that are productive at research tend to have robust infrastructure, including the presence of dedicated research faculty and staff, dedicated research time for faculty, embedded fellowship programs, and departmental strategic research plans.…”

“…Across specialties, a variety of interventions designed to increase department research have been published. 5,7,[15][16][17] Most published interventions occurred at single institutions and provide limited understanding of how academic departments can generally increase research productivity over time.…”

“…11,19 Potential mechanisms for increasing family medicine departmental research productivity include increasing protected faculty time, creating access to expertise in statistics or grant preparation, and developing interdisciplinary research teams. 5,20,21 The Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM) created a Research Capacity Scale (RCS) that classifies departments into one of five categories to describe departmental research capacity in a single, self-assessed survey item. 10,11 shows the criteria for each research capacity level as defined by the ADFM and used internally for over a decade.…”