These rubrics can be found on UK HealthCare's internal communications platform, The Loop.
For faculty at the UK College of Medicine, performance evaluations play a key role in promotions, tenure, and general professional development. They provide guidance for continuous advancement and ensure that each department’s job performance and productivity expectations are clear.
The Office for Faculty Affairs and Development (OFA) strives for all annual reviews to be conducted fairly and transparently. With this goal in mind, OFA has published standardized performance evaluation rubrics on The Loop, UK HealthCare’s internal communications platform.
“We want to make this process as transparent as possible so faculty fully understand how they’re evaluated and how they can advance in their careers,” Lisa Tannock, MD, vice dean for faculty affairs and development, said. “We hope that by providing this framework, we can promote consistency and equity in our evaluations to create a more supportive workplace.”
All faculty from both basic science and clinical departments have access to these documents, which can be found by clicking this direct link. Faculty can also log in to The Loop and click the faculty tab on the College of Medicine section’s left-side navigation menu. Once users have clicked “Performance Evaluation,” they can scroll to the bottom of the page to find the overall 2023 performance evaluation rubric and framework, as well as the individual rubrics for clinical service, which are specific for each clinical department.
“Our hope is that faculty take advantage of their access to these documents, so they are well prepared and know what to expect when their annual review comes along,” Dr. Tannock said. “Essentially, faculty should be able to evaluate themselves, so there should be no surprises.”
Evaluations will continue to use a five-point scale, with a score of 3 indicating that faculty are meeting expectations. As expectations are high in the College of Medicine, receiving a 3 should not be viewed as low performance. However, the 5-point range allows recognition of performance exceeding or not meeting expectations.
Recognizing that the implementation of the performance evaluation rubrics may lead to changes in scores from prior years, especially for faculty in departments that haven’t used rubrics before, promotion and tenure committees will be instructed that a change in score following implementation of the rubrics does not necessarily reflect a change in performance.
Evaluations are conducted by department chairs (in collaboration with division chiefs in many departments) and assess faculty performance from the previous academic year. While performance evaluations can take place any time through the end of October, OFA recommends they be conducted as close to the end of the academic year as possible.