Simpson, Deborah

Abstract The demand for high-quality faculty development in medical education is more acute than ever. Faculty developers’ responsibilities are growing exponentially as they are called upon to help medical faculty maintain expertise in an evolving array of content domains, curricular and assessment strategies, education technologies, and active learning methods. Faculty development has a long history of supporting medical education colleagues in times of change. More recently expectations for faculty developers are expanding due to (1) increasing enrollment of learners, (2) emphasis on learner-centered teaching practices and competency-based assessment methods, and (3) heightened accreditation standards for training faculty. Yet, faculty development in medical education lacks the conventional structures of a profession, such as an adopted set of competencies. In 2023, a series of sessions at regional, national, and international medical education conferences were held to generate ideas and collect examples of faculty developer competencies from over 100 stakeholders. More than 500 responses were gathered from prompts such as “What are the competencies faculty developers need?” and “What is one of the most valuable faculty developer competencies today?” This perspective offers both a rationale for establishing faculty development in medical education as a profession and a path forward through the provision and broad promotion of clearly defined core competencies. The competencies outlined are intended to help inform those entering or currently working in the profession, recruiters of faculty developers, medical education leaders, institutional partners, those conducting performance appraisals of faculty developers, and the broader medical education community. The aim of this work is to generate discussion among vested medical education and faculty development stakeholders who seek to provide structure, clarify roles, and further define medical education faculty development as a profession.

Caring for the growing elderly population will require specialty and subspecialty physicians who have not completed geriatric medicine fellowship training to participate actively in patient care. To meet this workforce demand, a sustainable approach to integrating geriatrics into specialty and subspecialty graduate medical education training is needed. This article describes the use of a geriatrics education team ( GET ) model to develop, implement, and sustain specialty‐specific geriatrics curricula using a systematic process of team formation and needs assessment through evaluation, with a unique focus on developing curricular interventions that are meaningful to each specialty and satisfy training, scholarship, and regulatory requirements. The GET model and associated results from 15 specialty residency and fellowship training programs over a 4‐year period include 93% curriculum sustainability after initial implementation, more than half of the programs introducing additional geriatrics education, and more than 80% of specialty GET s fulfilling their scholarship requirements through their curriculum dissemination. Win–wins and barriers encountered in using the GET model, along with the model's efficacy in curriculum development, sustainability, and dissemination, are summarized.