Cross-Cultural Interprofessional Faculty Development in Japan: Results of an Integrated Workshop for Clinical Teachers

Background: Faculty development programs, studied both home and abroad, have been shown to be helpful for enhancing the scholarly and academic work of nonacademic clinicians. Interprofessional education and faculty development efforts have been less well studied. This project investigated the effect of a well-studied faculty development program applied in an interprofessional fashion across health profession educators in medicine and nursing. Methods: A faculty cohort of nurse and physician educators at The University of Tokyo underwent training in the Stanford Faculty Development Center (SFDC) model of clinical teaching through a sequence of 7 workshops. The workshops were performed in English with all materials translated into Japanese. A validated, retrospective pretest and posttest instrument was used to measure study outcomes on global assessment of teaching abilities and specific teaching behaviors (STBs) at 1 and 12 months after intervention. Successful completion of Commitment to Change statements were also assessed at 12 months. Results: In total, 19 faculty participants completed the study. All participants found the workshops valuable. For global assessment, significant improvement in self-reported teaching abilities was seen comparing the mean pretest scores of 27.26 (maximum score = 55, standard deviation [SD] = 8.61) with mean scores at both 1 month (36.81, SD = 7.48, P < 0.001) and at 1 year (34.67, SD = 7.32, P < 0.001). For STBs, significant improvement was also seen comparing the mean group pretest score of 82.11 (maximum score = 145, SD = 15.72), to the posttest mean score of 111.11 (SD = 14.48, P < 0.001) and the 1-year mean score of 103.76 (SD = 12.87, P < 0.001). In total, 27/42 Commitment to Change statements were successfully completed at 1 year. Conclusions: Faculty development for improving clinical teaching can be performed across the cultures of medicine and nursing, as well as across the cultures of the United States and Japan.