Evaluation of faculty resources to meet curricular needs in an osteopathic medical school.

Howell et al • Medical education The type of curricular change occurring now in many of the nation’s medical schools typically places increased demands on faculty time and tends to change the nature of at least part of the faculty contact with students. For example, the move toward a more problembased or case-based curriculum tends to shift faculty effort away from lecturing and toward small group facilitating. Concurrently, restricted fiscal resources at many medical schools preclude hiring new faculty to cover these increased demands. Thus, the changes taking place in America’s medical schools require welldefined methods of assessing the costs of proposed curricular innovation in terms of increased time demands on available faculty resources. As new osteopathic medical colleges are proposed and existing schools attempt to accommodate new educational paradigms, curriculum-planning teams must strive to match workforce availability with workload demands. Recent articles propose formulae to determine faculty effort and contributions to a medical school’s education mission or to calculate faculty productivity in accordance with institutional priorities.1-3 These strategies focus on defining the value of faculty effort using relative-value and time-based units as a means to score performance, reward and promote faculty, and recognize teaching achievement. These methods focus on faculty resource availability and not on specific curricular demands. Curriculum planners need to be able to anticipate the demands of proposed curricular changes. They must anticipate whether the school has the necessary faculty resources, as opposed to dealing with faculty shortages after the fact. This type of planning is especially important for the establishment or accreditation of any new medical school. Failure to adequately provide for curricular needs with appropriate faculty resources leads to poor-quality educational experiences for students.