Furthering Vision, Voice, and Leadership in Academic Family Medicine Through the Leads and BRC Fellowships

Apply Today!

The mission of Association of Departments of Family Medicine (ADFM) is to support academic departments of family medicine to lead and achieve their full potential in care, education, scholarship, and advocacy to promote health and health equity. One critical element of this is supporting current leaders and growing future ones, particularly as we recognize “academic family medicine faces an impending leadership crisis, embodied by a deficit of available applicants for vacant chair positions nationwide.”¹

ADFM continues to look for ways to embolden future leaders in family medicine,² and to that end we take this opportunity to remind the community about the 2 fellowships we offer that are focused on cultivating skills for emerging leaders in academic family medicine and across health systems. Below, we also share details and outcomes of these programs.

We invite those who hear the call to leadership to consider these and other opportunities appropriate for their own career stage; STFM maintains a running list on behalf of the community of academic family medicine.

LEADS (Leadership Education for Academic Development and Success) Fellowship

The LEADS Fellowship grew out of the need for a robust and diverse leadership pipeline to meet the growing needs of academic departments of family medicine for both senior leaders and department chairs.^3-5 The program is designed for mid- to late-career family medicine leaders interested in pathways to leadership in academic or other health systems, including department chair, or who want to further explore if these roles would be a good career fit.

The 1-year fellowship curriculum is cohort responsive and structured around the Leadership Competencies for Family Medicine Department Chairs and Senior Leaders, developed by ADFM’s Leader Development Committee.³ Fellows participate in weekly virtual sessions focused on strategic career planning and a range of leadership topics, along with the opportunity to learn from their peers and faculty mentors through the program. The connections fellows make with their peers remains an important component of the fellowship. Each fellow selects a project to focus on throughout their fellowship year, culminating in an “Ignite Talk”-style presentation at the ADFM Annual Conference. The LEADS fellowship team prioritizes being responsive to current events in its weekly meetings and is always looking for opportunities to further its purpose, for example, recently offering a webinar in partnership with Witt Kieffer in hopes of demystifying the executive search process.

Since 2009, over 120 fellows have completed or are currently participating in the fellowship. Its longitudinal outcomes to date are robust; almost one-half of those who have graduated from the fellowship have assumed interim or permanent chair positions, and others have gone on to assume department-level senior leadership roles in academic family medicine. In order to recognize the changing role of senior leaders in family medicine, ADFM has expanded the focus of the fellowship to include Department Administrators and other health system leaders. The LEADS call for applications runs from February to June.

BRC (Building Research Capacity) Fellowship

This program focuses on another aspect that family medicine is looking for opportunities to strengthen frequently: building research capacity (BRC). BRC is a joint initiative between ADFM and NAPCRG that launched at the 2016 NAPCRG Annual Meeting.⁶ The initiative features multiple activities, including the BRC Fellowship. Now hosting its fourth cohort of fellows, the program has 3 aims:

• Coaching: Provide coaching support to build research and scholarship capacity within a program or institution

• Support: Develop a peer support/network among other individuals or teams trying to build research capacity

• Strategic Planning: Create a strategic plan for research and scholarship within their home program/institution

Throughout the fellowship year, participants engage with one another and program faculty in monthly meetings while developing a strategic plan for their own institution, which they present at the following NAPCRG Annual Meeting under the title “SPARC: Strategic Plans to Advance Research Capacity.”

In the evaluation of the 2023-2024 cohort experience, fellows shared that the systematic evaluations that are part of the fellowship curriculum led to changes such as increased coaching, monthly scholarly teaching, and half-day trainings within their home institutions. For example, one participant shared, “The fellowship and my organization’s interest in building research capacity have complemented each other perfectly and their alignment provides strength to effect change and improvements. The timing of the fellowship has felt like a real asset and catalyst to change/improvement at my organization thus far.” As the fellowship continues, the BRC Steering Committee plans to analyze fellows’ longitudinal impacts, including tracking progress in implementing their strategic plans. The BRC call for applications runs from April to July.