A continuing professional development imperative? Examining trends and characteristics of health professions education doctoral programs

(2022) 22:853 Kulo and Cestone BMC Medical Education https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03937-z Open Access RESEARCH A continuing professional development imperative? Examining trends and characteristics of health professions education doctoral programs Violet Kulo* and Christina Cestone Abstract Background: Despite the long-standing faculty development initiatives for improving teaching skills in the health professions, there is still a growing need for educators who are formally trained in educational theory and practice as health professions schools experience dramatic demand and growth. Graduate programs in health professions education (HPE) provide an avenue for health professions’ faculty continuing professional development to enhance their knowledge and skills for teaching and curriculum leadership roles. There has been a proliferation of certificate, master’s, and doctoral programs in HPE over the last two decades to respond to the growing need for well-prepared faculty educators and program leadership. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe current HPE doctoral programs in United States (U.S.) and Canada. Methods: The study first examined doctoral programs in HPE identified in earlier studies. Next, we searched the literature and the web to identify new doctoral programs in the U.S. and Canada that had been established between 2014, when the prior study was conducted, and 2022. We then collated and described the characteristics of these programs, highlighting their similarities and differences. Results: We identified a total of 20 doctoral programs, 17 in the U.S. and 3 in Canada. Of these, 12 programs in the U.S. and 1 program in Canada were established in the last 8 years. There are many similarities and some notable differences across programs with respect to degree title, admission requirements, duration, delivery format, curriculum, and graduation requirements. Most programs are delivered in a hybrid format and the average time for completion is 4 years. Conclusions: The workforce shortage facing health professional schools presents an opportunity, or perhaps imperative, for continuing professional development in HPE through certificate, master’s, or doctoral programs. With the current exponential growth of new doctoral programs, there is a need to standardize the title, degree requirements, and further develop core competencies that guide the knowledge and skills HPE graduates are expected to have upon graduation. Keywords: Health professions education, Continuing medical education, Continuing professional education, Continuing professional development, Faculty development *Correspondence: Health Professions Education, Graduate School, University of Maryland Baltimore, MD, Baltimore, USA © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Kulo and Cestone BMC Medical Education (2022) 22:853 Background Health professions will face dramatic workforce and faculty shortages nationally due to several converging factors: an aging workforce, a growth in care needs of an aging population, and expanding healthcare coverage [1]. For example, medicine will face an anticipated shortage between 54,100 and 139,000 physicians by 2033 [1, 2]. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing cites that on average there will be “175,900 openings for RNs each year through 2029 when nurse retirements and workforce exits are factored into the number of nurses needed in the U.S.” (p. 1) [3]. Further, the Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates the need for nurse anesthetists, nurse midwives, and nurse practitioners to grow by 40%, registered nurses by 6%, and the need for physician assistants is projected to grow by 28% through 2031 [4–6]. To combat looming attrition due to workforce aging, admissions and enrollment increases are evident across fields, from medicine, nursing, to physician assistants [7–9]. This expansion in the training pipeline exacerbates the pressing problem of faculty shortages that many health professions are already experiencing. For instance, 80,407 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing programs in 2019 mainly due to faculty shortages [10]. In a 2019 program survey, 88% of physician assistant programs reported lack of qualified faculty as a barrier to recruiting new faculty, and 90% of programs reported that candidates lack the required teaching experience [11]. Indeed, a majority of faculty in the health professions have little to no formal training in educational theory and practice, despite more than three decades of calls to develop and reward medical education teachers for their educational work [12]. This gap has traditionally been addressed by faculty development (FD) initiatives aimed at improving teaching skills. Bligh asserted that “successful faculty development results in improved teaching performance and leads to better learning outcomes for students or doctors” (p. 120) [13]. There have been longstanding FD initiatives in the health professions, with longitudinal programs cited as having sustained positive effects on intrapersonal, interpersonal, teaching, and career development [14]. In systematic reviews of FD literature, researchers reported numerous studies on initiatives designed to improve teaching effectiveness and leadership abilities in medical education [15–19]. They noted that participants’ knowledge of educational principles and specific instructional strategies increased, and gains in teaching skills as well as changes in instructional practices were reported [15, 16]. Similarly, for FD interventions designed to improve leadership abilities, participants reported changes in leadership behavior in addition to Page 2 of 13 gains in leadership knowledge and skills [18]. Ward and Stanulis proposed a model for FD using targeted coaching and assisted performance to help medical educators learn to teach effectively [20]. In nursing education, research on FD initiatives found an in (...truncated)