A systematic approach to faculty development for family practice faculty.

Although faculty developers often employ a systems approach to instruction when responding to individual faculty members' requests for assistance, they are seldom in a position to use this approach to conduct a unified faculty development program for an entire faculty with hundreds of members. This paper describes a two-year faculty development program in family medicine that used a systems approach to meet identified faculty needs through a series of integrated training efforts. Following this systematic framework involved several steps: using a needs assessment to identify faculty needs and preferred learning strategies, selecting instructors from local and national experts to conduct workshops and seminars, evaluating the program by examining participants' gains on the workshop/seminar objectives using a one-group repeated measures design employing self-assessments, and using evaluation results to revise faculty training programs to better meet their needs.