Moalims

Medical college faculty members are being asked to assume new academic duties for which they have received no formal training. These include problem-based learning, case-based tutorials, outcome-based education and new, computer-based instructional programmes. In order to succeed at these new teaching tasks, faculty development is essential. It is a tool for improving the educational vitality of academic institutions through attention to the competencies needed by individual teachers and to the institutional policies required to promote academic excellence. Over the past three decades, strategies to improve teaching have been influenced by the prevailing research on teaching medical educators.

To respond appropriately to the coming changes in medicine, we medical educators need to change medical education. We can do this by changing the people who teach medicine at all levels and change what they teach, how they teach, and how they carry out research in medical education. To accomplish this, faculty development must change. What should modern and future faculty development look like? How are we going to accelerate and evaluate changes in medical education?

Throughout the last few decades, both healthcare delivery and medical education have undergone extensive changes. Such changes have resulted in increasing demands on faculty to be creative and effective teachers, successful researchers and productive clinicians. Thus, to meet these demands, faculty have to acquire new knowledge, skills and abilities. Faculty Development is recognised by many medical education organisations as an essential support framework provided to faculty members to assist them in responding to the challenges of their multiple roles and evolving responsibilities.

Faculty development in medical education began in the 1950s and advanced in subsequent decades. Over the years it has continued to be part of the professional development of many medical educators. As medical schools respond to changes in society in general and healthcare in particular, there is a need to pay particular attention to faculty development. Universities make large investments in their faculty members by supporting their career development as teachers, researchers and service providers. It is one mechanism for improving the instructional competencies of teachers and the institutional policies required to promote academic excellence.

Participation in such faculty development programmes provides faculty members with entry into a new intellectual and social community of like-minded individuals who share a passion for teaching. It addresses a variety of instructional needs for teachers, students, residents and fellows who are required to teach but have little expertise and/or are launching their medical education careers, faculty members who teach at universities but for whom teaching is a small component of their responsibilities, or who have a major teaching role and also for faculty members who want to become medical education researchers and faculty developers.

A comprehensive faculty development programme should be built upon professional development. New faculty members should be oriented to the university and to their various faculty roles, instructional development, leadership development and organisational development. Continuous professional development, which is more important today than ever before, empowers faculty members to excel as educators and to create vibrant academic communities that value teaching and learning.

A comprehensive approach to medical education involves focusing primarily on the development of faculty members as teachers and issues related to core teaching competencies. Competency-based assessment, the hidden curriculum that faculty members encounter, continuing medical education and research on faculty development underlie the strategies for improving teaching practices. If faculty development is meant to play a leading role in ensuring that academic medicine remains responsive to faculty members and societal needs, a number of these subjects will need to be addressed.

Medical educators should broaden the focus of faculty development and target the various roles that clinicians and basic scientists play, including those of leader and scholar. They must also remember that faculty development can play a critical role in curricular and organisational change, and thus enlarge the scope of faculty development by moving beyond formal, structured activities, incorporating notions of self-directed learning, peer mentoring and work-based learning. In addition, medical educators should try to situate faculty development in a more global context and collaborate with international colleagues in the transformation of medical education and healthcare delivery. It can play a critical role in promoting culture change on a number of levels. A broader mandate, innovative programming that takes advantage of communities of practice and new partnerships can help achieve this objective.

Teaching must be promoted as a scholarly endeavour. An educational climate that fosters and rewards educational leadership, innovation and excellence in teaching is required in many medical colleges in Pakistan. Educational change is a complex process, particularly when large numbers of people from diverse cultural background are involved. Change may only be realised if medical educators meet their responsibilities and continue with their commitment to educational research.

Without a doubt, planners and implementers of medical education in Pakistan must try to benefit from the expertise, practices and modernisation taking place in medical education from the developed world but this does not mean that one must import broadly everything that is happening elsewhere. At the same time, there must not be a reinvention of the wheel, but medical faculty in Pakistan medical colleges and universities must be effective and involve critical thinkers, evaluators and leaders in medical education. It is imperative that modernisation in medical education should be congruent first and foremost with needs and an aspiration of our people if we are to truly claim that we are producing doctors fit to practice. Change must be welcomed and embraced wherever it can better the lives of the millions of people who still lack quality healthcare, especially in our country where medical care remains hopelessly inadequate.

Fawad Kaiser
The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK