Since 1979, the UNC Faculty Development Fellowship has graduated over 450 early-career, academic family physicans. Through interactive learning, fellows gain knowledge and skills needed to be effective teachers, mentors, and scholars. Fellows put these skills into practice through a series of projects completed at their parent organizations with fellowship faculty guidance.
Benefits
During the fellowship, participants receive:
- an opportunity to interact with a group of other faculty physicians at a similar career stage
- state-of-the-art materials on professional development, teaching, and evidence-based practice, presented by nationally recognized fellowship faculty
- faculty guidance and support in completing projects in curriculum planning, teaching assessment, and evidence-based practice
Fellowship graduates demonstrate:
- increased clarity of career goals and confidence in achieving them
- career satisfaction significantly higher than physicians generally
- high confidence in their teaching, scholarship, and administrative skills
Curriculum
The purpose of the fellowship curriculum is to introduce you, as new academic family physicians, to skills you need to be effective faculty members. Our goal is to equip you with knowledge, attitudes and skills you need to be effective faculty members as teachers and mentors, as consumers of and contributors to scholarship in family medicine, and as members of complex organizations. We have organized the fellowship curriculum into four components that mirror elements of the faculty role: Teaching & Learning, Leadership Development, Scholarship, and Patient Centered & Accountable Care. All aspects of the curriculum employ the same basic educational strategies tailored to adult learners—seminars, small group exercises, large-group didactic sessions, individual guidance and instruction by faculty advisors.
Teaching and Learning
As Family Medicine faculty, most fellows are responsible for a variety of teaching activities. Clinical teaching, or consulting, often represents the primary method of teaching for most faculty, and is at the center of a faculty member’s responsibilities. It also may be the most difficult method to structure or plan as it is based on unpredictable encounters with patients. Somehow, clinical teachers must reconcile concern for patients and their rights to competent care with learners' needs to learn. Most fellows also will teach small groups of learners. Finally, fellows are asked to provide instruction or make presentations to large groups of students, residents, or colleagues. Over the course of the year, the teaching & learning faculty will help fellows plan for and refine teaching skills for each of these three formats—clinical teaching, small group instruction, and large group instruction. Fellows will learn to give more effective feedback and deal with difficult situations in teaching. Further, no matter the format, fellows will be asked to develop educational programs and curricula. Few have received any formal training for this challenging task. Consequently, the Teaching and Learning Component also will place heavy emphasis on this aspect of being a teacher.
The Teaching and Learning Component is designed to help each fellow achieve two specific outcomes: design and planning of educational programs and teaching skills.
- Fellows will produce and present a plan for an educational program. The plan will include descriptions of the following: documentation of educational problem or need; program context, including resources and constraints and learner characteristics; desired outcomes for learners; strategies for assessing learner achievement of desired outcomes; program content and organization; instructional strategies and media.
- Teaching skills will include the following: Outpatient clinical consulting: Fellow will demonstrate effective use of the microskills of clinical teaching in a videotaped encounter with a learner at the fellow’s home institution. Large group instruction: Fellow will demonstrate effective large group teaching in a presentation to residents and faculty in UNC’s Department of Family Medicine. Small group instruction: Fellow will plan, conduct, and evaluate a small group teaching session and describe strategies for effective small group teaching. Evaluation and feedback: Fellow will demonstrate effective techniques for evaluating and giving feedback to other fellows and faculty in Teaching and Learning sessions. Challenging situations in teaching: Fellow will describe techniques for recognizing and dealing with a variety of challenging situations in teaching.
Leadership Development
The Leadership Development component engages fellows in an extended dialogue to support the proactive management of their own career in academic Family Medicine by exposing fellows to concepts of adult leadership development, leadership in medicine and change management. During the August session, fellows conduct an environmental scan of the landscape for family medicine, discuss key stages of adult leadership development, frameworks for considering one's career progression, and key elements of proactive career development. Fellows are given ample opportunities to reflect and discuss their own career goals and develop their own ‘personal leadership brand’. Between the August and November sessions, fellows complete at least one personal PDSA cycle related to at least one element of their own career. The November session focuses on assessing and managing the fit between themselves and their organization, exploring their own organization's tenure and promotion policies, discussing the outcome of their career destination interview, creating a personal career mission statement, and discussing the outcome of their initial attempts to develop or deepen a relationship with a mentor. Discussion and debrief of the first PDSA cycle for career planning will take place, and a new, rapid-cycle PDSA change will be initiated. Each fellow will participate in a one-on-one executive coaching session with a faculty member. Lastly, the June session will focus on risk-taking, setting a vision for oneself and the organization, and creating a vision of excellence for their career, their organization, and the discipline of family medicine; fellows will explore and develop their own "Career Board of Directors," and will discuss potential unexpected "curve balls" that might occur in their career, including both positive and negative events. Fellows will be asked to marry their personal leadership brand and their vision of excellence for themselves, their organizations and the discipline, and to summarize for their organizational sponsors what they have gleaned from the fellowship in terms of their professional and personal development.
Scholarship
The goals of the scholarship curriculum are to teach fellows to seek, weigh, formulate, reformulate, and communicate knowledge of clinical practice or teaching. This scholarship should be sustained, capable of assessment by peers, and disseminated in the public domain. The scholarship curriculum includes an intensive didactic component that introduces and reinforces essential skills, and an extensive experiential component in which fellows practice, refine, and adapt scholarship skills to the needs of their home programs and learners.
Three aspects of the experiential component span the entire year-long course of the fellowship and provide the setting for the curriculum.
- FDF Journal Club. Fellows will receive didactic instruction in literature searching, strength of evidence, and assessment of randomized, trials, observational studies, and systematic reviews. Each fellow will organize a journal club at his/her own program, review three articles over the course of the fellowship year, and submit a summary assessment for each. Fellowship faculty will provide constructive feedback on assessments and, when appropriate, will publish them on the FDF Journal Club Blog.
- FDF Case Report/Clinical Review Writing Groups. Fellows will receive didactic instruction in the structure and composition of case reports and focused clinical reviews, as well as writing abstracts and giving and responding to feedback. At the beginning of the fellowship year, fellows will be organized into writing groups of four to six, each facilitated by a fellowship faculty member. Each fellow will identify either a case to report or a clinical question to review. Fellows whose programs are members of the Family Physicians Inquiries Network (FPIN) may choose an available FPIN Clinical Inquiry. Over the course of the fellowship year, writing groups will meet during each on-campus period and at least once each interim via conference call. By the end of the fellowship year, each fellow will submit a case report or clinical review for publication
- FDF Practice Improvement (QI) Collaborative. Fellows will be introduced to the teaching practice collaborative model developed by the I3 Collaborative. They will also receive didactic instruction in fundamentals of the experimental method (common to both QI and educational assessment), basic measurement techniques, and basic statistics. Based on fellows expressed interests and program priorities, collaborative groups will be organized around specific clinical processes or outcomes, or educational interventions. Each collaborative group will consist of 4 to 5 fellows. Panels of 3 to 4 faculty (from various disciplines including FM) will provide guidance and mentorship to the collaborative. The collaboratives are especially suited to develop skills in team-based quality improvement, critical with respect to training for developing the Patient Centered Medical Home model. With faculty panel facilitation, each collaborative group will specify a population of interest, pertinent interventions, and measures. While at their home sites, fellows will participate in the online modules in Quality Improvement offered by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Open School. Over the course of the fellowship year, collaborative groups will regularly post data on interventions and measures. During monthly phone conferences, group members will share successes, failures, and lessons learned. During the final week of the fellowship, each collaborative will present its project outcomes and lessons learned in a fellows symposium. Formal feedback will be provided, and fellows will be encouraged to submit their project for presentation at an appropriate national meeting and to publish their outcomes.
Patient Centered & Accountable Care
The patient centered and accountable care curriculum is specifically designed to address the unique needs of early career faculty in this time of transformational change. The primary objectives of the curriculum are: To orient early career faculty to the historical moment within American medicine and family medicine in particular; and To equip early career faculty with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the changes they and their programs will need to become patient centered medical homes and negotiate with larger organizations to join accountable care organizations.
These objectives will be met with a mixture of didactic sessions to introduce new material as well as experiential individual and group exercises. As with other portions of the curriculum we will utilize case-based and small group discussions to ensure that fellows engage with the material. The curriculum will be organized into the following themes:
- Assessing and improving patient safety To introduce this theme, the most recent results of AHR‘s patient safety culture survey for medical offices for UNC‘s Family Medicine Center, along with comparative data from AHRQ‘s website, will be shared and discussed. Fellows will then be given an opportunity to take the survey themselves. The group’s combined anonymous results will be shared with the group for discussion. If their sites are not yet participating in the survey, the assignment between August and November will be to field the survey back in their own teaching practices. Fellows will assess their home programs patient safety programs and compare how they assess and investigate adverse events.
- Working on teams will build on the patient safety theme with presentations on how improved teamwork and coordination of care (handoffs, transitions of care) can improve outcomes. Fellows will be trained in portions of AHRQ and DoD‘s evidence based TeamSTEPPS training program and will discuss how they might apply this training in their own programs. Assignments between the November and March sessions will be to use the training they have received with their practice teams in their own programs.
- Health Information Technology for the Patient-Centered Medical Home will allow fellows to share from their own programs and identify current examples of how HIT is supporting the principles of PCMH. Programs that are actively pursuing meaningful use recognition by CMS will share their experiences, both positive and negative, with the process. Representatives of UNC Healthcare‘s Information Technology and Meaningful Use Implementation teams will share current performance metrics and strategies for improvement.
- Measuring for Performance will expand fellows understanding of measurement for improvement. We will assess fellows own prior knowledge and experience with performance measurement, give examples of performance measurement from sites participating in the I3 collaborative and give fellows tools to track performance measures in run charts for their own practices. Small groups of fellows will use the 2011 NCQA PCMH recognition standards to develop performance measures and design dashboards of performance measures for the PCMH.
Site last updated December 6, 2011
