National Trends in Mentoring
Since this guide was first published in August 1997, more academic medical institutions are stepping up efforts to enhance faculty development opportunities. Many of these efforts are particularly targeted toward those professionals marginalized from the traditional tenure-track environment: predominately junior (and often female) faculty with heavy clinical loads, heavy to moderate teaching responsibilities, and little time for scholarly activities. 45,49,53
As academic health care centers face serious budget constraints,
faculty recruitment and retention initiatives must look beyond
a basic financial compensation package. Professional development
opportunities and new programs aimed at promoting innovative
faculty pathways — not only tenure-track researchers/physicians
— become key in building a stable base of researchers,
clinicians, and educators. There are as many different strategies
being developed to address these challenges as there are academic
medical centers. They range from the "macro" (re-thinking
the concept of tenure and what constitutes "scholarship")
to the "micro" (stopping the tenure "clock"
for faculty with family responsibilities). One strategy gaining
universal appeal is the development of mentoring programs.
They take up little room in the budget and they have an intrinsic
appeal to both junior and senior academic medicine professionals
who are steeped in the tradition of passing on knowledge and
experience to their students, their patients and each other.
A recent report describing the initiation and maintenance of leadership programs for women in seven U.S. medical schools shows mentoring programs feature prominently in strategies to improve faculty life.49 The schools' mentoring programs differed from one another with some encouraging network mentoring (such as on-campus and external development workshops) and others choosing the traditional
"one-on-one" approach. The needs and contexts of each institution were a factor in mentorship program design. The biggest obstacle reported was inadequate time to be a mentor or mentee after program initiation. Strategies to counter this issue include developing mentoring awards, revising promotion and tenure to require and reward mentoring, and including mentoring activities on curricula vitae.
There is still a long way to go in providing academic medical faculty with
adequate mentoring resources; but as more surveys and reports surface, institutions take notice. As a resource to schools developing programs, AAMC is compiling brief descriptions of medical school faculty mentoring programs. Descriptions have already been obtained from the following schools: Stanford University, University
of Arkansas, University of Wisconsin, Boston University, University of Texas-Houston, the Mayo Clinic, UCLA, University of Calgary, MCP Hahnemann and East Carolina University. Additional information about mentoring programs at these institutions can be obtained by visiting their Web sites.
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