The Evolution of a Faculty Development Program in an Academic Psychiatry Department

Issues affecting faculty development in academic psychiatry departments have taken on a special urgency as a result of declining financial support from government sources and the emerging consequences of this country’s fast-evolving health care system. Junior faculty need usable information on how to succeed in academia. Available information from the senior administration (“top-dawn”) often lacks the immediacy and accessibility of grassroots (“bottom-up”) strategies that more experienced junior colleagues have discovered. Over the past 2 years, the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center has focused attention on codifying these grassroots efforts and on integrating them with formal departmental initiatives. The authors describe how general recommendations formulated by departmental planning committees and a Continuous Quality Improvement Team on faculty development were developed into a formal, concrete program f or career development. (Academic Psychiatry 1997; 21:107–115)