Mentoring: Shaping the professional identity of the academic internal medicine hospitalist

Background: Burnout and lagging academic productivity are pressing challenges in hospital medicine, leading to stagnation and attrition. Mentoring shapes professional identity formation and enhances faculty vitality and retention, but has not been optimized among academic hospitalists. Objectives: We sought to explore how mentoring impacts academic hospitalist professional identity and to elucidate barriers to mentoring in the field. Methods: We conducted focus groups at three academic medical centers. Informed by social-constructivist theory of identity development, we coded deidentified data and performed thematic analysis. Results: Thirty-one academic hospitalists participated with 1 to >20 years experience. Mentoring shaped professional identity formation in six core domains: choosing academic hospital medicine, identifying and focusing on an area of interest, progressing career, navigating work-life integration, staying in academic medicine, and becoming a mentor. Distinct models included dyadic mentoring, peer mentoring, organic mentoring, and mentoring teams, each with benefits and limitations. We identified nine key mentoring actions that influenced hospitalist professional identity formation and career development. Mentoring barriers included lack of time, awareness, and access to experienced mentors, as well as poor quality mentoring and mentor-mentee malalignment. Aspects of hospitalists' professional identity also posed barriers, including ambivalence around academic identity. Conclusions: Mentoring fosters academic thriving and retention in academic hospitalists. Access to effective mentoring remains lacking due to few senior mentors in the relatively new field of hospital medicine and reticence in academic identity, among other factors. Mentoring training, impact on underrepresented minority hospitalists, and integration into institutional culture should be considered for enhancing the career development of academic hospitalists.