06/04/08

 

BY SUSAN IPAKTCHIAN

	Overall, 72 percent of medical faculty said they were very satisfied or satisfied working at the School of Medicine. Female faculty expressed less satisfaction than their male peers in all the survey’s major areas.

A new survey shows that faculty members at the School of Medicine generally have a higher rate of job satisfaction than their counterparts at nine other medical schools.

But within the school itself, the survey shows that female faculty members are consistently less satisfied than their male counterparts, and that the school's clinical faculty aren't as positive as the basic science faculty. Additionally, it points out areas in which all faculty members believe the school could improve, such as putting more value on both teaching and community service, and applying promotion criteria more consistently.

School leaders say that they've been working in recent years on many of the concerns raised in the survey, and that they will increase their efforts to broaden the reach of the programs and initiatives aimed at addressing the problem areas.

"We're listening fervently to our faculty, and any additional input we can have from them is really welcome," said Hannah Valantine, MD, senior associate dean for diversity and leadership.

The survey is similar to one administered to the Stanford University faculty in 2003, but this version was tailored for use by medical schools. The American Association of Medical Colleges selected Stanford and nine other medical schools to test the newly designed survey, with the goal of expanding its use to more medical schools in the future.

The pilot study compared Stanford's results to three peer medical schools (UC-San Francisco, UC-San Diego and the University of Pennsylvania) as well as six other participating schools. It was administered between April and June of 2007. The survey was developed by a higher-education organization known as COACHE.

The online survey contained 115 questions that covered nine main areas, such as climate, culture and collegiality; compensation and benefits; mentoring and feedback, and institutional governance. Of Stanford's 775 medical school faculty members, 38 percent responded. A summary of the findings is available online at http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/.

Overall, 72 percent of Stanford's respondents said they were satisfied working at the medical school, compared with 65 percent at the three peer institutions and 62 percent of all the participating medical schools.

Among the factors receiving higher satisfaction ratings at Stanford than at its peer institutions were incentive compensation, housing benefits, tuition benefits, child-care assistance, communication from the dean's office and the department chairs, and overall satisfaction with the medical school as a place to work.

Some of the areas that drew lower ratings from Stanford's faculty than those at peer institutions were: the value placed on teaching and on community service, health benefits and the pace of advancement. Additionally, Stanford's faculty expressed more disagreement than the peer institutions as to whether the requirements for teaching and institutional service are clear, and whether promotion criteria are consistently applied.

David Stevenson, MD, vice dean and senior associate dean for academic affairs, said he believes the concerns about promotion criteria can largely be traced to the different expectations for basic science faculty and for clinical faculty. While basic science faculty are evaluated predominantly on research and teaching, clinical faculty are judged on a mixture of roles—research, teaching and patient care—and the proportion of those three roles varies, depending on the needs of individual departments.

"Let's say you have a clinical faculty member in one department and someone in the same position in another department, and they might seem to be in different roles with different expectations," Stevenson said. "There might be different proportions of contributions in scholarship, teaching and clinical activity between these two, but in evaluating them at the school level we're looking at the overall mix."

Stevenson said a school task force will soon release a report reiterating the expectations for clinical faculty, and he will share the findings with junior faculty members as well as those who make promotion decisions: department chairs, division chiefs and members of departmental appointment and promotion committees. "We're trying to get the leadership to understand what we're telling the junior faculty so that they understand how to counsel people properly in these complex roles," he said.

Both Stevenson and Valantine said the wider ranges of roles for clinical faculty could also explain why their responses were more negative than those of Stanford's basic science faculty. For instance, 82 percent of the basic science faculty were satisfied with the medical school as a place to work compared with 71 percent of the clinical faculty.

The internal comparisons also show that the school's female faculty members expressed less satisfaction than their male counterparts in all nine of the major areas covered by the survey. On the question of the medical school as a place to work, for example, 68 percent of the men expressed satisfaction compared with 59 percent of the women. And when asked if the school's atmosphere cultivates collegiality, just 52 percent of the women agreed while 63 percent of the men did.

Valantine said the differences between men and women didn't come as a surprise given the results of surveys and reports in previous years, but noted that her office has created leadership programs and networking activities that can help the women on the faculty advance their careers. Because the programs are relatively new, she believes it will take another few years to assess their effectiveness.

Overall, she and Stevenson said the school is making strides in improving the atmosphere for the women on the faculty. "We're much, much better than we were, but I think there's more work that needs to be done," Stevenson said.