Scholar 7: The development of regional community hospitals’ scholastic environment

Abstract

The importance of increasing scholarly activity has been highlighted among residency programs currently accredited by the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) to ensure a smooth transition to the single accreditation system. The Scholar 7 program, a series of seven 2-hour sessions, was created to aid faculty and residents in the pursuit of scholarly work and to facilitate change in an entire community hospital system’s environment by creating a self-replicating scholarly culture in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Skills were taught by means of preparation and submission of a research protocol to the institutional review board (IRB) along with grant proposals. The authors tracked scholarly work, IRB submissions, and grants awarded to participants during the 2015-2016 academic year. The results were compared in a post-hoc fashion with previous classes since 2007-2008 within the same hospitals system. The Scholar 7 program successfully aided faculty in achieving their required pursuit of scholarly work in 8 months. This program has the potential to help AOA-focused residency programs meet the scholarly requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.