Use of faculty development to improve ambulatory-care education

Faculty and academic institutions face significant challenges in delivering effective ambulatory-care teaching to house staff and medical students. The effects of a faculty-development program on individual ambulatory-care faculty's knowledge, skills, and attitudes; and on participants' recommendations for improving the ambulatory-care environment were examined. The faculty development program trained faculty in either clinical teaching (CT), medical decision making (MDM), or preventive medicine (PM). Ten facilitators implemented a faculty-development program for 64 ambulatory-care faculty. On a 5-point scale (1 = definitely not, 5 = definitely yes), participants rated the usefulness of the seminars as 4.8 or greater. For the CT seminars, statistically significant pre- to post-intervention improvements were found for all seven categories of teaching skills covered (p< 0.001). For the MDM seminars, the participants' content knowledge increased from a pretest mean of 49% correct to a posttest mean of 70% correct (p = 0.01). Participants formulated 45 recommendations for improving the ambulatory-care setting; approximately one-half of these recommendations had been implemented by the institutions 6 months after completion of the program. Faculty-development programs improve the skills of individual faculty and may provide a method for generating recommendations to improve ambulatory-care education and patient care at the institutional level.