Programs Help Faculty Enhance Skills and Advance Careers

		A husband and wife team, Professors James Hurley and Susan Brockerhoff, examine a tank of zebrafish being screened for ocular defects. Zebrafish provide a model genetic system for studying the diseases of human vision at the biochemical level.

One of the marks of excellence of University of Washington medical faculty members is their desire to keep upgrading their skills throughout their academic careers. Whether their interest is teaching, research, patient care, mentoring, bioethics, leadership, or other areas, the UW offers many programs and services to assist them in their professional growth.

Signifying the importance of faculty development to the UW medical school, Dr. Paul G. Ramsey, vice president for medical affairs and dean of the medical school, appointed the first assistant dean for faculty development. The new position is held by Dr. Christina Surawicz, who has a longstanding reputation locally and nationally for her work in this area. Surawicz is a professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and chief of gastroenterology at Harborview Medical Center.

In her role as assistant dean, Surawicz is designing, implementing, and coordinating faculty development programs across the medical school. She is conducting surveys to identify faculty development issues, meeting with department chairs to create mentoring programs, establishing resources, and maintaining an online newsletter to promote faculty development activities. Known for her sense of humor and sound advice, Surawicz is a national speaker on academic leadership and on personal/professional balance.

In addition to creating new faculty development initiatives, the UW medical school has several longstanding programs. The medical school’s strong reputation in this area has made it an international leader in faculty development. As just one example, the Department of Medical Education and Bioinformatics and the Office of Academic Affairs have helped medical schools in China expand their own faculty development programs.

For several decades the Department of Medical Education has offered workshops to UW medical faculty in pedagogy and in effective presentations. Recent workshops have covered such areas as interprofessional collaboration on patient safety, cross-cultural tools for effective leadership, and professionalism in medical education and practice.

To assist scientists in establishing and maintaining research projects, the Office of Research and Graduate Education sponsors the Research Funding Service, which instructs faculty on locating funding sources, grant writing, grant approval processes, and other related skills.

Several UW medical school departments have nationally recognized training offerings for their faculty members. Of particular note are efforts designed for clinical faculty who teach medical students and residents in the WWAMI area and who want to add to their instructional repertoires. As but one of many examples, the semi-annual Faculty Development Workshops in the UW Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology have become a national model for medical school departments to convey current trends in medical education, as well as to inspire a spirit of camaraderie among geographically scattered clinical faculty.

Faculty leaders in the Division of General Internal Medicine were among the co-authors of a book for community-based clinical faculty, Teaching in Your Office, which covers such topics as offering criticism and maximizing instruction time. The UW Department of Family Medicine is widely recognized for its training of family practice residency faculty. Several departments have individual faculty members advise on medical faculty development on a national scale, for example, in programs to expand academic career opportunities for minority physicians and scientists.

UW faculty members and departments have been successful in competing for national funding earmarked for faculty development. Several young faculty scientists, teachers and clinicians have received career development awards from professional societies in their fields. Federal funding has helped establish UW programs to bridge the gap between clinical and research training. These programs enable young physicians to establish research careers and eventually become independent investigators. The training format is sometimes a mentored research experience with a successful investigator.

All of these efforts to assist individual faculty members in reaching their professional goals contribute overall to the UW medical school’s prominence in education, research, community service, and patient care.