Leading for Medical Teacher Well-Being in Health Professions Education: Ten Evidence-Informed Actions for Sustainable Educational Leadership.

Abstract

Medical teachers work across teaching, assessment, clinical care, research, administration, and mentorship. Persistent workload pressure, insufficient recognition, moral distress, and limited institutional support can compromise faculty well-being and threaten the sustainability of health professions education. The aim of this narrative review is to synthesize leadership and organizational strategies that can support medical-teacher well-being and translate them into a practical framework for educational leaders. A targeted literature search was conducted using PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection to identify publications on faculty well-being, educational leadership, workload, psychological safety, mentorship, moral distress, faculty development, and organizational culture in health professions education and academic medicine. Recent reviews, systematic reviews, consensus statements, and guideline-oriented publications were emphasized, while retaining selected seminal sources for foundational concepts. The ten actions were formulated through narrative synthesis of the selected literature, contextualized by the authors' experience in medical education and faculty development. We propose ten complementary actions: institutionalize well-being as a leadership responsibility; lead with compassion and psychological safety; model sustainable boundaries and cognitive renewal; distribute workload fairly and account for hidden work; recognize teaching and educational labor; build collegiality and connection; address moral distress and compassion fatigue; invest in mentorship and career development; integrate well-being literacy into faculty development; and evaluate, learn, and adapt through participatory governance. Faculty well-being cannot be sustained through individual resilience strategies alone. Leaders must alter the conditions in which medical teachers work by combining relational leadership with fair systems, meaningful recognition, protected development, and continuous evaluation. The framework is an author-derived, evidence-informed synthesis rather than a validated or causal implementation model and requires prospective evaluation across diverse institutional and cultural settings.

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