Teaching the Teacher: Novel Faculty Development for VA Hospitalists

Limitations and Future Directions

There are several limitations to this preliminary study. Participation at each site was voluntary and did not always reach the full potential audience of hospitalist clinician educators. As one participant stated, future directions include doing “more to involve teachers who need to learn [these skills]. The ones who attended [from our institution] were already the best teachers.” In addition, despite the asynchronous option, lack of protected time for faculty development may be a limiting factor in participation. Support from institutional and national leadership would likely improve participation.

Measured endpoints to date consist primarily of participant satisfaction and do not yet capture objective changes in teaching. Data collection is ongoing to assess immediate and longitudinal changes in confidence and behaviors of attendees and how this might affect their health professions learners.

Last, our initial needs assessment only targeted academic hospitalists, and the needs of VA hospitalists in rural areas or at facilities without academic affiliation may be different. More research is needed to understand the diverse faculty that comprises both urban and rural VA sites, what their professional development needs are, and how those needs can be met.

Conclusions

Teaching the Teacher is a faculty development pilot, tailored to meet the needs of VA hospitalist clinician educators, that has been voluntarily adopted at multiple VA sites. The facilitated discussion format allows participants to guide the conversation and personalize content, thereby promoting a culture of discussing challenges and best practices among colleagues that we hope endures beyond the bounds of the curriculum. The program focuses on elevating the specific teaching mission of the VA and could be incorporated into onboarding and regular VA-sponsored faculty development updates. While Teaching the Teacher was originally developed for VA hospitalists, most of the content is applicable to clinicians outside hospital medicine. This project serves as a model for training clinical educators and has opportunities to expand across VA as a customizable didactic platform.

Acknowledgments

We thank Brian Schneider, MD, for his tireless support of this program, as well as all the VA clinicians who have shared their time, talents, and wisdom with us since this program’s inception.