Faculty development: What academic primary care physicians need to know and what they want to know

Background: Recruiting and retaining junior faculty is key to the success of academic medicine, particularly in the primary care disciplines. Purpose: This study integrated principles of adult education and instructional design to identify and prioritize clinical and nonclinical training needs to guide faculty development planning for primary care internal medicine physicians. Methods: A questionnaire was administered. Paired t tests were used to examine differences between faculty's current and desired levels of expertise in 5 nonclinical domains. Content analysis was used to examine responses about clinical skills. Results: Paired t tests indicated current levels of competence lower, p < .001, than desired levels in all nonclinical domains. Content analysis surfaced clinical procedures with high frequency. Clinical skills were chosen by faculty as their training priority. Conclusions: Desire for state-of-art clinical skills needed by academic primary care physicians may overshadow their desire to learn nonclinical career-advancement skills. To succeed over time, the challenge of effective faculty development is to integrate both areas.