van Bruggen J M E, Chen H C, van der Schaaf M F, Pennings H J M
UMC Utrecht Center for Research and Development of HPE, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Pasadena, CA, USA.
BMC Med Educ. 2025 Jul 11;25(1):1035. doi: 10.1186/s12909-025-07628-3.
High quality professional education requires good educators who show engagement with teaching in addition to content knowledge and didactic skills. In health professions education it is common that teaching faculty combine their teaching role with roles in patient care and/or research. However, previous studies on work engagement have mainly focused on jobs as a whole and not considered people who combine roles or tasks that could have different demands. This study aims to describe how health professions educators' work engagement in teaching, in combination with research and patient care, evolved over time at an academic medical center in the Netherlands.
All teaching faculty at the center were invited to complete the same online questionnaire in 2011, 2016, and 2022, where their work engagement was measured using the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) and they rated 22 items affecting their engagement in teaching. We calculated descriptive statistics; computed engagement score means for overall work and individual task areas (teaching, research, and patient care); and compared means across groups with various task area combinations and across years. We also performed content analysis of responses to the open-ended questions in the questionnaire.
Work engagement scores overall and for each task area (teaching, research, and patient care) fluctuated over time. Job-related aspects enhancing engagement in teaching included 'autonomy' and 'appreciation.' 'Teaching about my own specialty' consistently scored high.
Teaching faculty in our center are engaged with teaching tasks and their work engagement is consistently high over time. Combining roles might be positively related to teaching engagement by maintaining balance when job demands in other tasks increase. To maintain and increase teaching engagement, organizations should focus on the provision of time, autonomy, and support to health professions educators. Teaching engagement may increase more through content knowledge and autonomy in teaching than by facilitating educational research and dissemination opportunities.
高质量的专业教育需要优秀的教育工作者，他们除了具备专业知识和教学技能外，还需展现出对教学的投入。在卫生专业教育中，教师通常将教学角色与患者护理和/或研究角色相结合。然而，以往关于工作投入的研究主要关注整体工作，并未考虑那些承担可能有不同要求的多种角色或任务的人员。本研究旨在描述荷兰一家学术医疗中心的卫生专业教育工作者在教学、研究和患者护理相结合的工作中，其工作投入随时间的变化情况。
邀请该中心所有教师在2011年、2016年和2022年完成相同的在线问卷，使用乌得勒支工作投入量表（UWES - 9）测量他们的工作投入，并对影响他们教学投入的22个项目进行评分。我们计算了描述性统计数据；计算了整体工作和各个任务领域（教学、研究和患者护理）的投入得分均值；并比较了不同任务领域组合的组间均值以及不同年份的均值。我们还对问卷中开放式问题的回答进行了内容分析。
整体工作投入得分以及每个任务领域（教学、研究和患者护理）的得分随时间波动。增强教学投入的与工作相关的方面包括“自主性”和“赞赏”。“讲授我自己的专业领域知识”得分一直很高。
我们中心的教师积极参与教学任务，并且随着时间推移其工作投入一直很高。角色的结合可能通过在其他任务的工作需求增加时保持平衡而与教学投入呈正相关。为了维持和提高教学投入，组织应专注于为卫生专业教育工作者提供时间、自主性和支持。与通过促进教育研究和传播机会相比，教学投入可能更多地通过教学中的专业知识和自主性来提高。
