Mid-Career Research Training for the Generalist Physician: Case Study of a Balancing Act

Abstract

Background: Although generalist physician faculty typically lack the skills needed to conduct research, few medical schools offer on-site faculty development programs that teach research skills. Description: To address this dilemma, our medical school introduced a part-time Primary Care Research Fellowship offering full-day classes once a week over 10 months. Evaluation: We asked the 22 general internists, general pediatricians, and family physicians who participated in the program to rate their experience, and we measured their research productivity during the 3 years before and 3 years after completing the program, using a group of matched controls for comparison. Participants rated the program highly and increased their aggregate research productivity from 1 publication before completing the program to 6 publications afterward, although this increase did not reach statistical significance ( p = .09). Controls exhibited substantially higher baseline productivity than fellows (10 publications vs. 1 publication, p = .03), but controls' productivity changed little between the first and second measurement periods (10 and 7 publications, respectively). Conclusion: Our mid-career research training program enabled primary care academic faculty to gain confidence in their ability to conduct a scientific study with minimal disruption to their teaching and clinical activities.

This study was sponsored, in part, by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Generalist Physician Initiative and by award #2D54HP00022 from the Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Public Health Service.

We are grateful to Elizabeth Kachur, PhD, for assistance developing the questionnaire and to Qiuhu Shi, PhD, for help with the statistical analysis.

Notes

^a N = 8. (These components were added to the questionnaire in the 1999–2000 academic year).