Blending research support and mentorship to foster scholarly activity at a resource-limited institution.

Abstract

To the Editor, Paediatricians in academic departments face a multitude of barriers to undertaking scholarly work, including clinical responsibilities, limited protected time, limited extramural funding, and lack of mentorship from established researchers. To overcome these obstacles, prior reports have described teams that provide primarily logistical support (1), or models in which senior faculty with established success in publication and extramural funding serve as mentors who catalyze career development for junior faculty (2). While informal mentorship of emerging clinician scientists by staff researchers is common in basic science fields (3), mentorship by research staff is less common as part of clinical faculty development (4). At our rural academic medical centre, the Department of Paediatrics restructured and expanded the clinical research team in 2018, with research faculty and staff being jointly responsible for project execution as well as mentorship of clinical faculty undertaking scholarly projects. The resulting rapid increase in academic productivity provides initial evidence in support of this strategy for empowering small research teams to guide development of a scholarly portfolio at academic paediatric departments.