A Brief Faculty Development Program for Family Medicine Chief Residents

A minority of programs in family medicine have an educationally sound training and evaluation system for chief residents. We have developed a brief faculty development intervention for family medicine chief residents aimed at improving administrative and education skills. The workshop addresses six important areas in administration, management, and education: job descriptions, style differences in teacher and learner, managing the morning report and small-group learning, administrative model for leadership, performance evaluation and feedback, and dealing with the learner in need. Residents rated the quality and relevance of the workshop components on 5-point Likert scales as 4.25 and 4.13, respectively. They rated their perceived knowledge gain on a 5-point Likert scale as 4.13. The mean objective test scores of knowledge, before and after the workshop, were 53.9 and 77.4 (p =.0001). Thus, it was concluded that a brief workshop for chief residents can have a favorable impact on resident knowledge concerning important topics in education and administration and recommend that residency program administrators give further attention to the training and faculty development of chief residents—our academic colleagues of the future.