Teacher training for rheumatology fellows: a national needs assessment of fellows and program directors.

There is significant need to develop effective fellow-as-teacher programs aimed at enhancing fellows' teaching skills, with focus on giving feedback and working within fellow and faculty time constraints. The program can help address a curriculum gap identified by fellows as well as PDs before fellowship-to-faculty transition.Key Points• There is a notable gap between faculty physicians' expectations to teach as clinician-educators and the lack of training dedicated to learning how to teach during medical training. Despite the fact that past clinical educators have identified instructional design and assessment as low-confidence areas, there is a paucity of structured program dedicated to developing these teaching skills during fellowship training.• With 97% fellows and 84% program directors, both groups agreed fellows could use additional instruction in teaching skills, but there was a significant discrepancy between fellow and program director perspectives regarding fellows' ability to give feedback.• Consistent with past needs assessments in other medical specialties, lack of time and potential faculty interest were recognized as potential barriers, calling for a structured training program dedicated to education on didactics that takes into account trainee and faculty time constraints.• Our needs assessment can direct future research on analyzing effectiveness of fellow-as-teacher program implementation by focusing on improvement of fellow teaching and feedback skills.