Standing Tall: Advancing Your Career as an Academic Clinician and Educator in Hospice and Palliative Medicine (FR410)

Abstract

•Identify and engage in steps to start a professional development plan for academic advancement and success.•Define the broadened scope of scholarship for academic advancement to include education, clinical practice, and leadership.•List strategies for building a clinical and/or educational portfolio from work that you already do. The majority of academic interdisciplinary clinicians in hospice and palliative medicine such as the physicians, nurses and social work faculty spend a large proportion of their time in clinical practice and teaching, and therefore may face unique struggles related to academic/career advancement. Faculty working in the areas of clinical innovation and education have important scholarly contributions that should be shared with the field to advance our knowledge. Many faculty erroneously believe that only rigorously designed research projects are worthy of dissemination or feel unsure about how to share their clinical innovation, quality improvement, and education work in a scholarly way. Building a portfolio of scholarly work is important when seeking advancement and/or promotion. There exists a lack of local mentors who can guide clinicians and educators on how to develop and successfully submit a portfolio since senior leadership such as Chairs have traditionally advanced on research tracks themselves. We plan to use a panel with expertise both in academic palliative medicine and faculty affairs to assist attendees in identifying how to develop a professional development plan including options for scholarship such as case reports, thought pieces, quality improvement, clinical innovation, and education projects. The goal will be for faculty to identify and document their work with a broadened scope of scholarship as contributions to the field and for their academic advancement.