Faculty physicians and scientists in U.S. medical schools hold a multitude of leading roles in American health care by educating physicians, driving and applying research in biomedical and behavioral sciences, and providing sophisticated clinical care for patients, often to underserved groups. As such, faculty physicians and scientists are a critical resource and a national investment that must function optimally.

Several studies of faculty in academic medicine report high levels of dissatisfaction, attrition, burnout rates, and unethical behavior in research.

In response to this, the National Initiative on Gender, Culture & Leadership in Medicine (C-Change) designed the Learning Action Network (LAN), a geographically diverse and representative five-medical school consortium that aimed to change the organizational culture of academic medicine through dialogue and leadership (eight semi-annual two-and-a-half-day meetings). LAN meetings were designed to provide a safe and trusting environment where participants felt they would participate in transformative thinking about culture, diversity, and organizational change.
The C-Change Faculty Survey (CFS) is an instrument developed to assess the culture in medical schools and academic health centers. C-Change fielded the CFS to a stratified random sample of faculty in 26 representative U.S. medical schools. With this rich dataset, C-Change’s research team collaborated on multiple published studies that revealed serious fissures in the culture of academic medicine including feelings of moral distress at work, low vitality, lackluster mentoring, and poor institutional support.

The CFS has been refined over time, adding several new measures and adapting it to assess the learning environment for residents and medical students. The CFS has been used successfully in dozens of studies in U.S. medical schools as well as internationally, and was selected by the NIH to be a primary evaluation tool for the 19 institutions receiving transformative Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) awards.