Residency Accreditation Toolkit: Faculty and Resident Scholarship Requirements
Over a 5-year period the program faculty as a whole are required by ACGME to have accomplishments in specific domains.
Faculty Scholarship Requirements
The goal of faculty scholarship is to create an environment of intellectual curiosity and continuous self-improvement for residents. Therefore, even though the requirements apply to the program as a whole and individual faculty do not have specific expectations, all core faculty should be engaged in some of the broad array of identified scholarly activities and should have an annual assessment of their progress.Over a 5-year period the program faculty as a whole are required by ACGME to have accomplishments in 3 of the following scholarship domains:
- Research in basic science, education, translational science, patient care, or population health
- Peer-reviewed grants
- Quality improvement and/or patient safety initiatives
- Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, review articles, chapters in medical textbooks, or case reports
- Creation of curricula, evaluation tools, didactic educational activities, or electronic educational materials
- Contribution to professional committees, educational organizations, or editorial boards
- Innovations in education
These accomplishments should be demonstrated by dissemination of the work in the following ways:
- Faculty participation in grand rounds, posters, workshops, quality improvement presentations, podium presentations, grant leadership, non-peer-reviewed print/electronic resources, articles or publications, book chapters, textbooks, webinars, service on professional committees, or serving as a journal reviewer, journal editorial board member, or editor
- Peer-reviewed publication
Resident Scholarship
The ACGME requires residents to complete 2 scholarly projects, 1 of which must be a quality improvement project. This aligns with the ABFM’s requirement for a performance improvement project, and the ABFM provides a substantial menu of possible projects, as well as a customizable process for residencies called RESPIP.Since quality reporting is now a standard for clinical practices it can be helpful and efficient for residents to align their QI projects with organizational goals.Programs should think broadly about other scholarly projects for residents. Community health projects and interventions, community health educational activities, health screenings projects, and clinical interventions aimed at lifestyle changes are just a few ideas of projects that are popular with family medicine residents.Poster presentations at state, regional, and national meetings are perhaps the most popular vehicle for meeting the dissemination requirement, and also provide the resident the professional meeting experience. These sessions also expose program directors and faculty to a wide variety of projects that can generate ideas for their own programs.The STFM Conference on Practice and Quality Improvement has a submission category specifically for residents.
