Medical academic staff selection and academic staff organisation's criteria

Abstract

World Federation for Medical Education's global standards are used widely in the medical education all over the world. The purpose of this study was to analyze the diversity of existing academic staffs in one of the medical faculties in Turkey (Istanbul Medical Faculty, ITF) and in the world and also to compare and analyze the staffs' characteristics. In this study, according to the Shanghai classification 2012 the most popular six universities' web pages were examined and evaluated in detail. These universities were Harvard University, University of California San Francisco (UCSF), Johns Hopkins University, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford University and Cambridge university. Of the academic personnel in departments provided in the websites of the faculty of medicines in these six universities, educational variety and the number at Bachelor's degree and academic titles were reviewed. Some of the non-medical basic science academic staff were found to be over 50%. Some clinical branches like anesthesia, general surgery, cardiovascular surgery and transplantation, all the academic personnel both in ITF and the other six universities were medical doctor and had special training on these clinical branches. In the Department of Psychiatry, the range of people from different areas of expertise with PhD degree ranged from 8-56%, it was found to be lowest in ITF and Stanford University. Only in Public Health Department of ITF, the non-medical graduates and medical graduates ratios were similar to the leading universities in the world. All of these results showed that, one of the leading universities in the world provide clinical, educational and research activities in mosaic concept. In our country, in clinical sciences branches there were multidisciplinary people from different areas of expertise, however it is understood that PhD's were not provided enough in academic staff.