Challenges and Issues Surrounding Promotion and Tenure of Faculty with Clinical Service Responsibilities in Veterinary Medicine.

Abstract

Mentoring, assessing, and rewarding faculty who have clinical service responsibilities with promotion and tenure can be challenging in many respects. Clinical service responsibilities can limit the time that faculty have available to participate in scholarly activities, especially if the scholarship required for promotion is restricted to traditional research efforts where an individual faculty member is assessed in terms of the number of scientific publications in high-tiered journals with senior authorship and the amount of extramural funding garnered. Even if other forms of scholarship are recognized, metrics used to evaluate research efforts are often inappropriately applied to other scholarly activities. This challenge is not unique to veterinary medicine. This literature review reveals information regarding barriers and recommended solutions from other healthcare and service professions as recognizing scholarly engagement in academic veterinary medicine is just beginning. Opportunities and examples of how faculty can derive scholarship from their clinical service activities are provided. In addition, an approach for mentoring faculty in the prospective planning and documenting of scholarly engagement efforts is suggested. Lastly, challenges and guidance for assessing such scholarship in academic veterinary medicine are recommended as one step toward encouraging colleges of veterinary medicine to develop methods to assess scholarly engagement within their promotion and tenure processes. A change in approach to the promotion and tenure process can result in more faculty being rewarded for their clinical, diagnostic, and scholarly excellence, which positively impacts patient care, career fulfillment, institutional reputation, the veterinary profession, and society as a whole.