Mentoring Fellows into Career Educators through a Multispecialty Clinician-Educator Course

Background: Subspecialty fellows are a unique group of trainees for whom there currently exist few opportunities to pursue formal training as clinician-educators, as singular fellowship programs often face significant obstacles to implementing such coursework.

Objective: To develop, implement, and assess a clinician-educator course for fellows from multiple subspecialty fellowships at a single large academic medical center.

Methods: Our course, entitled Fellow as Clinician-Educator, was initiated across numerous fellowship programs from August 2021 to April 2023 at University of California San Diego Health. The synchronous component of the curriculum included four half-day workshops targeting various clinician-educator subcompetencies. The course also included ongoing educational opportunities, longitudinal mentorship, and a medical education capstone project. Measures with pre and postcourse knowledge assessments and surveys were performed to evaluate the course's impact in this prospective observational cohort.

Results: Forty-six fellows enrolled in the course. Overall, there was statistically significant improvement in learners' confidence across 16 of 18 clinician-educator skills surveyed (P < 0.05). Participants demonstrated improvement in nine core topics for clinician-educators, achieving statistical significance for feedback (P = 0.0058), lecture slide design (P = 0.0006), and multimedia design principles (P = 0.0416). The course facilitated medical education scholarship in the form of 4 grant submissions, 7 manuscripts, 27 presented abstracts, and 24 curricular innovations.

Conclusion: Implementation of a multispecialty clinician-educator course for subspecialty fellows is feasible, effective, and facilitates academic scholarship in medical education. Such programs may also serve to circumnavigate many challenges that single fellowship programs face when attempting to pursue their own directed clinician-educator courses.