Establishing Departmental Mentorship Programs

Abstract

All academic medical departments and colleges of medicine wish to have their faculty perform at the highest possible levels in order to achieve both individual and organizational academic, educational, and clinical goals. Having a mentorship program to provide advice to junior faculty members in the hope of improving performance has come into vogue. There is objective evidence to support the use of mentorship programs for this purpose. However, I would suggest that, while mentoring relationships are an important aspect in assisting faculty members to achieve their goals, they are not sufficient in most instances. Isolated mentorship matching programs frequently lack structure, commonly have problems with creating the best possible mentor-mentee dyads, usually lack accountability, and have few objective outcome metrics. The most successful programs include a clear set of organizational goals, an infrastructure to support the programmatic functions, the ability to teach important professional skills, and a system of metrics to determine whether the program is actually succeeding along with mentor matching. There are many examples of what appear to be successful programs existing in academic departments. There are fewer that cross departments and serve entire colleges of medicine or universities. Clearly, the larger the organization such faculty development programs encompass, the more resources they have and the more sophisticated they can become.