Milestones as a Guide for Academic Career Development

Abstract

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.

Prevalence of and Associations With Distress and Professional Burnout Among Otolaryngologists: Part I, Trainees

“…57,58 Developing and supporting well-being leaders, implementing programs to reduce clerical burden and paperwork, and providing protected nonclinical time are examples that have been demonstrated to reduce burnout and improve well-being. 59,60 In a recent study, Stevens et al reported that protected nonclinical time was beneficial for well-being, burnout, and QOL in a small sample of otolaryngology residents from a single institution. 60,61 However, as noted, the primary drivers of worsening burnout and well-being are organizational characteristics, policies, and culture and not simply a lack of individual resiliency.…”

“…Identifying common distressing elements contributing to this difference, such as excessive call or clerical burden, would provide targets for change that could be implemented to improve burnout among these training years 57 , 58 . Developing and supporting well‐being leaders, implementing programs to reduce clerical burden and paperwork, and providing protected nonclinical time are examples that have been demonstrated to reduce burnout and improve well‐being 59 , 60 . In a recent study, Stevens et al reported that protected nonclinical time was beneficial for well‐being, burnout, and QOL in a small sample of otolaryngology residents from a single institution 60 , 61…”

Pediatric emergency medicine fellows’ milestone evaluations: Do they all meet the targets for graduation?

“…The ability to correlate target milestone levels to success in independent clinical practice would allow for establishment of more definitive graduation benchmarks for PDs 18 . A group of family practice physicians developed milestones for faculty based on the ACGME core competencies 19 . In developing and validating these milestone criteria, they used a combination of levels 3 and 4 from the ACGME SCs as goal level for faculty at the assistant professor level.…”

“…18 A group of family practice physicians developed milestones for faculty based on the ACGME core competencies. 19 In developing and validating these milestone criteria, they used a combination of levels 3 and 4 from the ACGME SCs as goal level for faculty at the assistant professor level. If faculty are not holding themselves to the ACGME target standards of level 4 for graduation, it seems unrealistic to hold trainees to that standard.…”

Milestones as a Faculty Development Tool for Career Academic Physicians

“…We chose to model the educational milestones created by the ACGME to develop milestones for faculty that we previously developed and utilized in our own family medicine department. 6 To externalize our milestones for use in additional medical specialties, we requested input from educators and specialists throughout our medical center. The example rubric (Figure 1) shows the changes made for the radiology department as an example of how the milestones were customized for each discipline.…”