Research Report
The Impact of a Faculty Learning Community on Professional and Personal Development: The Facilitator Training Program of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare Calvin L. Chou, MD, PhD, Krista Hirschmann, MA, PhD, Auguste H. Fortin VI, MD, MPH, and Peter R. Lichstein, MD
Abstract Purpose Relationship-centered care attends to the entire network of human relationships essential to patient care. Few faculty development programs prepare faculty to teach principles and skills in relationship-centered care. One exception is the Facilitator Training Program (FTP), a 25-year-old training program of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare. The authors surveyed FTP graduates to determine the efficacy of its curriculum and the most important elements for participants’ learning. Method In 2007, surveys containing quantitative and narrative elements were distributed
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edical care that is patient- and relationship-centered links to improved health outcomes, enhanced patient satisfaction, and reduced risk of medical malpractice claims.1–4 Patient-centered care, named by the Institute of Medicine as a core value of medical practice, emphasizes the needs and preferences of individual patients; from a systems perspective, its focus is the patient– clinician dyad. In contrast, relationshipcentered care1,5,6 recognizes a broader field of relationships, including family members, the community, and all those providing patient care. Relationshipcentered care incorporates competencies Please see the end of this article for information about the authors. Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Chou, Department of Medicine, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 4150 Clement St. (111), San Francisco, CA 94121; telephone: (415) 221-4810, ext. 2740; fax: (415) 750-6982; e-mail:
[email protected]. Acad Med. 2014;89:00–00. First published online doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000000268
Academic Medicine, Vol. 89, No. 7 / July 2014
to 51 FTP graduates. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The authors analyzed narratives using Burke’s dramatistic pentad as a qualitative framework to delineate how interrelated themes interacted in the FTP.
mutual success. Methods of developing skills in personal awareness, group facilitation, teaching, and feedback constituted agency. The purpose was to learn skills and to join a community to share common values.
Results Forty-seven respondents (92%) identified two essential acts that happened in the program: an iterative learning process, leading to heightened personal awareness and group facilitation skills; and longevity of learning and effect on career. The structure of the program’s learning community provided the scene, and the agents were the participants, who provided support and contributed to
Conclusions The FTP is a learning community that provided faculty with skills in principles of relationship-centered care. Four further features that describe elements of this successful faculty-based learning community are achievement of s elfidentified goals, distance learning modalities, opportunities to safely discuss workplace issues outside the workplace, and self-renewing membership.
identified by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, including communication skills, practicebased learning and improvement, professionalism, and systems-based practice.7 However, few resources provide faculty with the interpersonal communication and facilitation skills needed to practice and teach the relationship-centered approach. Since 1988, the Facilitator Training Program (FTP) of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcare (AACH) has focused on enhancing the practice and teaching of relationship-centered care. Unlike traditional faculty development programs, which use large-group didactic sessions that have little effect on skill acquisition,8 the FTP uses the structure of a learning community, fostering relationships as the foundation of learning. First described in college and university settings, learning communities are intentional collections of learners and
faculty established to maximize student learning and use facilitated interactions to build networks that support intellectual and social intercourse.9 Four basic principles of learning communities are promoting caring, trust, and teamwork; enhancing communication between learners and faculty; helping learners establish academic support networks; and helping learners establish social support networks.9,10 Learning communities value and promote relationships at all levels, among learners, among teachers, and between teachers and learners. These communities are rooted in social learning theory,11 which posits that a community of learners is more likely to achieve new learning and behavior change than any single isolated individual. Developing learning communities among faculty can theoretically improve faculty development efforts,12,13 but little is currently known about how learning communities practically aid faculty learners, particularly with regard to fostering relationship-centered care.
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Research Report
Using narratives from graduates of the FTP, we sought to discern how this learning community succeeded in training faculty for relationship-centered care. Specifically, we wished to determine how graduates perceived the program’s impact on their professional and personal lives, and what similarities and differences existed between this faculty learning community and others already described.
Table 1 Core Competencies of the Facilitator Training Program of the American Academy on Communication in Healthcarea Core competency Clinical interviewing skills Small-group facilitation
Examples of core competencies Perform clinical interviews using relationship-centered skills Create a supportive learning environment, track group process, manage problematic participation, provide effective feedback
Interpersonal skills Demonstrate genuineness and unconditional positive regard
History and Overview of the FTP
The AACH was established in 1978 to support research and teaching of communication skills and r elationshipcentered health care. The AACH offers an annual national faculty development course and regional courses for those interested in improving their relationshipcentered care skills. The learning in these courses occurs primarily in learnercentered, facilitated small groups and includes training in personal awareness as well as communication skills.14 To help develop highly skilled facilitators for these small groups, the FTP was established in 1988. In addition to becoming AACH course facilitators, graduates of the FTP bring their learning back to their home institutions, clinical practices, and professional societies as they teach and practice relationship-centered care; thus, the FTP functions as a professional development fellowship beyond its original mission of developing facilitators for AACH courses. From its inception, the FTP has recognized parallel processes between the values and skills underpinning relationshipcentered care and those required for relationship-centered teaching.1,6,15,16 Its curriculum uses Carl Rogers’17 principles of unconditional positive regard, empathy, safety, and trust and explicitly emphasizes self-reflection, personal awareness, learner-centered learning, and acquisition of communication and relationship skills honed through frequent deliberate practice and feedback.18,19 Table 1 lists core competencies of the FTP. Facilitator training progresses through three levels marked by increasing responsibility for facilitating small groups of learners at AACH courses. Advancement from one level to the next requires demonstrated competence in group facilitation, teaching, and personal awareness. Trainees’ experiences at AACH courses supplement their day-to-day learning at their home
2
Self-directed learning
Implement a learning plan effectively
Personal awareness
Communicate awareness about personal feelings, attitudes, and behaviors
Further details about the Facilitator Training Program can be found at http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www. aachonline.org/resource/resmgr/fit12prgmdescription.pdf.30
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institutions working with patients and learners. Most trainees enter the program in midcareer and take three to five years to complete the curriculum, usually with financial support from their home institution. Tuition for the FTP is $1,750 per year for three years, and $500 per year thereafter. Each trainee selects from the AACH faculty a guide, who supports and assesses the trainee’s progress. Except for the annual weeklong winter course meeting and work together at annual national faculty development courses, the great majority of the work of the FTP occurs virtually through monthly phone calls between trainees and guides. At the conclusion of training, the FTP certifies trainees as competent in small-group facilitation and deems them eligible for faculty status at AACH courses and as guides for the FTP. Method
In March 2007, we distributed a survey to all 51 graduates of the AACH FTP to date. We did not survey seven participants who began but did not complete the FTP. Questions used a four-point scale to assess graduates’ self-reported perceptions about their improvement in workplace skills (1 = unimproved, 4 = much improved), the importance of FTP activities for their learning, and barriers to participation (1 = unimportant, 4 = very important). Respondents completed either a Web-based or paper version of the survey; we issued three rounds of invitations before closing the survey. We transcribed handwritten data to the Web-based platform, and we retrieved data from the survey Web site
for analysis, denuded of identifiers. We offered no incentives for participation. The institutional review board of Wake Forest University approved this study. Our qualitative analysis examined participants’ comments on the survey item “Please describe how participation in the FTP has changed your professional and/or personal life.” Initially, we used the constant comparative method to analyze the themes that arose in the narratives, but we found that relationships and overlaps between individual themes incompletely described the transformative learning process. Therefore, we employed Burke’s20 dramatistic pentad as a method of qualitative analysis to allow for more careful delineation. Burke examines language as a dramatic event that contains five parts: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. By identifying these five parts, one can track the causal relationship among the parts and how they operate as a system. In short, we sought to understand more deeply how the various parts of the FTP successfully interact and mutually support one another rather than analyzing decontextualized responses. Three of us (C.L.C., K.H., P.L.) trained in this approach independently coded the responses, and exchanged and discussed interpretations until we reached consensus. Results
The response to the survey was 47 parti cipants (92% response rate). Table 2 shows demographic characteristics of graduates of the program; mean age at graduation was 55. Table 3 shows participants’ self-
Academic Medicine, Vol. 89, No. 7 / July 2014
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Research Report
Table 2 Self-Reported Demographic Characteristics of Graduates of the Facilitator Training Program, From a Study of 47 Participants’ Personal and Professional Development, 2007a Characteristic
Measure
Age at graduation, mean 30–39
55.7 2
40–49
7
50–59
21
60–69
12
≥70
4
Gender, no. (%) Male
27 (57.4)
Female
20 (42.6)
Years in FTP between 1990 and 2007, no.