Authors' Response to “In Response to ‘Promotion Preparation Tips for Academic Family Medicine Educators’”

We thank Drs Slattengren and Westby for highlighting the need for national reform of promotion and tenure practices within academic medicine. Their concerns have been echoed in the past. “Guidelines for Promotion of Clinician-Educators” ¹ was proposed in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by Lubitz et al in 1997 and included the need for different metrics, including a teaching activity record, teaching portfolio, and clinical activity record. Although the uptake has been slow, as noted by a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, ² there has been a big shift toward the addition of clinician-or-educator and clinician-educator tracks at major institutions. These tracks are opportunities for family medicine educators to highlight their full body of work, not just the number of their publications, for consideration for promotion. Knowing Drs Slattengren and Westby's own institution’s options for promotion pathways and the criteria for each pathway is highlighted in our article. It is a crucial step both in the clinician-educators promotion process and in advocating for an equitable promotion pathway at your institution if one does not yet exist.