Compensation for teaching in critical care

Objectives: To determine the financial or nonclinical time critical care program directors or teaching faculty members receive as compensation for their educational activities. To compare compensation types and amounts among critical care specialties and between university vs. nonuniversity sponsoring institutions. Data Sources and Extraction: Survey returns (46%) from critical care fellowship directors listed in the American Medical Association Graduate Medical Education Directory. Information was stratified according to fellowship specialty and type of sponsoring hospital and compared by chi-square analysis and the Kruskal-Wallis test. Conclusions: Most program directors (77%) and faculty (82%) receive no specified compensation for education-related activities. Multidisciplinary programs are more likely to compensate faculty members than other specialty-specific programs (p =.006). Most programs sponsored by university or military/federal hospitals do not provide specified compensation (79% and 100%, respectively). Overall, community hospital-based programs provide a greater percentage of compensation to directors and faculty than university programs (for directors, p = .02; odds ratio, 3.85; for faculty, p = .001; odds ratio, 8.4). When compensation is specified, it is most often financial and it averages 18% of the salary (range, 5% to 100%) for directors and 19% of the salary for faculty (range, 5% to 50%), When reduced clinical time is provided (5% of program directors, 2% of faculty), it averages 13% (range, 8% to 18%) for directors and 18% (range, 10% to 25%) for faculty. Alternative methods for assigning educational compensation are discussed.