Development-Needs , Priorities and Preferences in Health Professions Education-Questionnaire-Based Descriptive Study

Introduction: Instructors in the health professions today must acquire knowledge and competencies. The domains necessary are teaching, assessment, curriculum support, organizational leadership, and mentoring. Most Health professions Educational Institutions support faculty development programs as a way of providing opportunities for professional and personal growth in knowledge, skills, motivation, attitude, and innovation. Method: This is a Questionnaire based study. Two sets of questions were prepared. Questions were validated and assessed for reliability. Total Number 640, Administrators 120, Faculty520 Result: Number of responses recorded 423/640 (66.09%), Faculty 349/520 (67.11%), Administrators -74/120 (61.66%). Faculty; It is clear that only roles of teacher and presumed benefits of FDP's were observed to be significant. Significance is noticed in items roles of teacher and Newer contents of FDP. The respondents who had attended MCI have opinionated that it is the role of the teacher to fulfil the FDP and there are some newer content areas that should be covered in FDP. Administrators; only significance is noticed with respect to the respondents who had attended NCI/DCI and they felt that it is better to organize FDP's. Clinical faculty felt that specialized FDP's are to be organized. Conclusion: The need for faculty development is universal and it is clear by the responses given by the faculty.


Introduction
Faculty are the greatest "Human Resource" who teach knowledge and skills to students in an educational organization.
Health professions faculty were often not trained in education and primarily delivered content via lecture, a method that research suggests is not the best way to engage students and promote knowledge retention (Sutkin, 2008;Swanwick, 2008).
Faculty development is the key component of medical education. The primary purpose of Faculty Development programs is to improve skills in instructions and professionalization of the educational activities of health professionals in colleges of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, physical therapy, and other health professions schools (Laura, 2007;Hauer, 2008;Stritter, 1983). This will obviously benefit students and improve their performance. Many studies have reported on the characteristics of effective medical teachers 45 Vol. 13, no. 2, 2019(Leslie, 2013Paul, 2006). Some of the commonly cited characteristics include content expertise, excellent communication skills, a non-judgmental personality, and good mentorship. There is increasing demands on medical teachers to be creative and effective teachers, successful investigators, and productive clinicians. These pressures have been derived from contemporary curriculum development, competition in the health care institutions, and from the limited resources for research. All these have emphasized that such changes entailed faculty members to attain new knowledge, diverse skills, and abilities in many aspects including, managing multiple roles and new responsibilities like clinical instruction, micro-group teaching, problem-based tutorials, case-based discussions, become mentors, and develop and evaluate new curricula.
Faculty members need to be prepared enough by faculty development program (FDP) in order to deal with the rapid changes and shifting paradigms in medical education, health care delivery systems, and clinical practice. Without such training, medical teachers are often reduced to instructors presenting their understanding of the subject by one-way lecturing. The concept of faculty development in higher education was started by Gaff in 1975(Gaff, 1975. These included all those activities that were to help teachers to improve their teaching skills, design improved curricula, and enhance the organizational climate for education. Stritter described setting up individual consultations on teaching skills, curriculum design, and collaborative educational research (Stritter, 1983). Most Medical and Health professions Educational Institutions support faculty development programs as a way of providing opportunities for professional and personal growth in knowledge, skills, motivation, attitude, and innovation. The impact of these programs on respective institutions is unknown because sound evaluation procedures to measure their outcomes have been lacking. WHO in its mandate has emphasised the need for focusing on all health professions beyond traditional silos, with emphasis on medicine, nursing, and public health-Health Professionals for a New Century: Transforming Education to Strengthen Health Systems in an Interdependent World-Oct 2011. Goal is to create transformative and interdependent professional education for equity in health. In order to achieve this, WHO has envisaged few reforms in Health education. In view of this, the NEED BASED faculty development programmes (FDP) are essential and the opinion from faculty and administrators should be solicited to plan for future FDP's. Our study is done to assess the attitude and perception of faculty and Administrators about FDP's in our University and to make suggestions to improve the horizon of existing FDP's.

Objectives
In order to determine educational needs of the faculty and to identify the priority-areas of faculty members' educational knowledge we conducted this study.
• To assess the attitude and perception of faculty members towards various dimensions of FDPs. • To assess the attitude and perception of Administrators at SBVU and its constituent Colleges.

Methods
This is a validated Questionnaire based study. From Table 2 to 6 comparisons are carried out using Independent samples t-test and ANOVA for which the groups considered are Age, Sex, MCI, NCI/DCI and Members of MEU. The observed p-value which is less than 0.05 is marked with '*' implies that they are significant. Detail description is there for each table.
It is clear that only roles of teacher and presumed benefits of FDP's are observed to be significant. This significance can be interpreted as, "female participants feel that it is the role of teacher that has to be fulfilled and at the same time they opined that there are some presumed benefits of FDP's. - Table 3 Significance is noticed in items roles of teacher and Newer contents of FDP. The respondents who have attended MCI have opinionated that it is the role of the teacher to fulfil the FDP and there are some newer content areas that are covered in FDP. Similar interpretation can be drawn where in the respondents who have attended MEU/DEU/NEU workshops reported that newer content areas for FDP should be introduced- Table 4, 5, 6.

Administrator's questionnaire-Statistical report
Maximum number of Administrators were in the age group of 53-59 yrs. and they were predominantly males. 48% of faculty who responded to the questionnaire were from the clinical side. There were equal number of administrators who had done Basic Workshop in medical education conducted by Medical Council of India. Majority of the Administrators were members of their respective educational units- Table 7.
Members of respective educational units were in favour of organizing FDP's than nonmembers (p < 0.00), and also opined that this will improve the competencies of faculty (p<0.019) - Table 8.
Clinical faculty were more in favour of organizing FDP'S than Non-Clinical faculty (p <0.000). Clinical faculty were more in favour of organizing "Specialised FDP's" (p < 0.045) - Table 9.

Highlights of the study
• Only significance is noticed with respect to the respondents who have attended NCI/DCI and feel that it is better to organize FDP's.
• Similarly, the respondents who have attended MEU/NEU/DEU felt that FDP's are to be organized and in turn these will develop competencies in faculty.
• With respect to subject, Clinical people feel that FDP's are to be organized and there should be some specialized activities of FDP.

Comments & Suggestions
• The concept of faculty development is evolving and expanding. • Research skills are becoming a major focus of faculty development. • Teaching skills are still a prominent aspect of faculty development. • The institutional environment has become a focus of faculty development. • Faculty evaluation is an effective approach to faculty development. • The efficacy of faculty development needs better documentation and the efficacy should be evaluated by students and faculty performance.

Discussion
Various studies have evaluated many aspects of Health Professions education. The key competencies most highly reported were "plan instructional methods and materials" (Leslie, 2013), "promote retention and knowledge and skills" (Branch, 2009), and "using appropriate teaching strategies for different levels of learners" (Branch, 2009). The most frequent competencies identified were "establish and maintain professional credibility" (Sutkin, 2008), "utilize scholarly and practical approaches in program evaluation" (Swanwick, 2008), "demonstrate teaching competence". Most of these sentiments were echoed by the faculty and administrators in our study also.
Although HPE programs come in many forms, the general consensus is that more robust programs over a longer period of time lead to better results for faculty (Snell, 2000;Techian, 2012). Programs often reflect the needs and the culture of the host institution (Thomas, 2016). Most programs focus on individual faculty, but team-based and institution-focused approaches are growing in popularity (Thorndyke, 2006). Our study also reiterates the same opinion regarding longer term programs which address the faculty needs.

Conclusion
Professional training programs for faculty members have become essential to higher education institutions in order to be able to compete in this ever-changing world. Faculty development has become well established and has grown into a recognized activity within higher education. Professional development programs produce promising outcomes in the learning and teaching practices and many FDPs have proven effective in developing faculty skills and educational leadership. In this ever-competitive world of education and patient care faculty development constitutes a strategic lever for institutional excellence and quality, and essentially important means for advancing forward institutional readiness to bring in the desired change in response to the ever-growing complex demands facing health professions education. In our study the response rate is only 65.78%, which is of acceptable range for qualitative questionnaire-based study (40-75%). It is encouraging to see that majority of faculty feel the necessity for "NEED based" FDP's. Administrators are also of the opinion that Faculty should be competent, and that FDP's go a long way to strengthen the main resource of a Higher education institutions and University.

Acknowledgement
We would like to thank all the faculty participants who took part in the study.

Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.