Back to Front PageVOLUME 6, NUMBER 4

AAMC Scholar Examines the Role of the Department Chair

By Barbara Gabriel

Robert Jones, Ph.D., and Julien Biebuyck, M.D., Ph.D., are collaborating to articulate the best practices in the selection and development of department chairs.

Julien Biebuyck, M.D., Ph.D., refers to medical school department chairs as "the ultimate faculty members." He stresses that their job - no less than "articulating the diverse responsibilities of colleagues to ensure they uphold the tripartite mission of medical schools" - is an increasingly difficult one.

Currently a Robert G. Petersdorf scholar-in-residence at the AAMC and former senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Dr. Biebuyck is researching and writing what he hopes will be a seminal text defining best practices in the selection, recruitment, appointment, and development of department chairs in academic medicine.

He explains that despite department chairs' key leadership position, their performance expectations are often unclear. "In many medical schools, job descriptions for department chairs do not exist," says Dr. Biebuyck. "As a result, deans and faculty members frequently have divergent ideas concerning the responsibilities of and expectations for department chairs."

Dr. Biebuyck believes that more clearly defining the roles and mission-related responsibilities of department chairs can help rectify the growing imbalance among the patient care, research, and education missions of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Specifically, he says, department chairs and deans are the only ones who can lead and help academic physicians, who feel pressed to spend more and more hours on patient care, to refocus on teaching and research.

"To some faculty members, academic medicine is beginning to resemble private practice, which has only one mission," he explains. "Some of our most talented physician-scientists and clinician-educators are seeing the reasons they went into academic medicine disappear, and that's a great threat to medical schools, which stand to lose their faculty to the private sector."

In response to that threat, Dr. Biebuyck, Robert Jones, Ph.D., associate vice president of the AAMC Section for Institutional and Faculty Studies, and Joseph Keyes, vice president of the AAMC Division of Institutional Planning and Development, are documenting the characteristics and behaviors of medical schools that hold their clinical chairs responsible for upholding the education and research missions, in addition to the clinical missions, of their respective departments. Dr. Biebuyck stresses that to maintain academic medicine's "mission balance," department chairs must ensure that new faculty have time to develop their roles as educators and researchers.

But he acknowledges that the challenge to both keep departments financially stable and maintain high morale by allowing physicians to pursue their teaching and research interests is a daunting one. "The remedy and approach to this resides clearly within the leadership of the deans, and the leadership, responsibility, and accountability of department chairs," he says.

Prescribing a method for recruiting, mentoring, and retaining chairs who fit this tall order is at the heart of Dr. Biebuyck's work at the AAMC. He will build on the foundation established at the 1998 AAMC conference "Defining the Role of the Clinical Department Chair" by gathering information on the current state of formalized chair responsibilities in medical schools, soliciting the opinions of deans and chairs on their respective responsibilities, and exploring new roles the AAMC can play in providing leadership training to established and aspiring department chairs.

By June 2001, Dr. Biebuyck and his AAMC colleagues anticipate the publication of a manual of best practices, which will include recommendations on search, selection, recruitment, and appointment processes, as well as enumerated characteristics, responsibilities, and expectations of successful department chairs. "I hope our publication will give academic leaders the tools they need to identify individuals who can inspire their colleagues to make important contributions to medical education," says Dr. Biebuyck.

Information: Julien Biebuyck, M.D., Ph.D., (202) 862-6220

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03 May 2001