URiM Faculty Retention through Stay Interviews: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Abstract

Academic medical centers can improve the quality of care and address health inequities by recruiting and retaining faculty historically underrepresented in medicine and STEM (URiM). Extant literature has reported the experience and limited number of URiM faculty in academic medicine. Scholars and practitioners have identified retention of URiM faculty as a significant concern in part because URiM faculty are less likely to remain in academia and be promoted when compared with their white-majority peers. While exit interviews can be beneficial, they might not provide the most accurate feedback. For example, if an employee is leaving an organization, they might not want to burn bridges by offering negative feedback.10 In academia, where the networks are broad, but the specialties and research niches are small, burning bridges is not an option. Given the state of URiM faculty in academic medicine and the departmental commitment to its faculty, the department leadership decided to conduct stay interviews with URiM faculty as the first phase of a retention effort. What follows is not only a descriptive account of experiences of URiM in the department of medicine, but also an exploration if stay interviews should be implemented across all divisions for faculty and staff.