StandPoint Survey
2026 StandPoint Survey Launches in April
The UVA School of Medicine recognizes that our faculty members are a vital resource. They perform a multitude of critical roles and undertake significant responsibilities, including delivering excellent health care, conducting groundbreaking research, and teaching the next generation of doctors. They contribute significantly to not only the advancement of our institution but also the advancement of the future of academic medicine and health care.
Understanding the central role of faculty in our work, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) developed StandPoint™ Surveys to support medical schools’ initiatives to attract and retain top academic scientists, educators, and clinicians.
The UVA School of Medicine previously undertook this effort in 2022, 2018, and 2015, and 2009. We are pleased to share that we have chosen to continue our participation this April.
All full-time and part-time UVA SOM faculty members were invited to take part in the StandPoint Faculty Engagement Survey. Faculty hired on or before January 1, 2026 will receive a survey invitation via email from AAMC.
Continued faculty participation is vital and will allow the SOM to assess firsthand what drives faculty engagement at UVA and inform meaningful action plans.
Based on what previous StandPoint survey results helped us to learn about faculty, we initiated many important improvements, including:
- Faculty leave policies: significant updates that increase number of days of annual leave, add sick leave, and add compensatory leave when faculty have worked on holidays.
- Faculty senate and shared governance: continued elevation of role of faculty senate as representative body for SOM, faculty senate ownership of faculty senate elections, and faculty senate leadership of general faculty meetings.
- Mentorship: The Early Career Faculty Mentorship Program began in 2020 and has served seven annual cohorts and 250 mentors and mentees.
To view 2022 Standpoint Survey results, past Action Plans, and the March 31, 2023 Zoom session recording, click here.
StandPoint, developed and reviewed by experts in survey design, academic medicine, talent management, and organizational development, grew from a series of in-depth focus groups with medical school clinical and basic science faculty members. This independent, research-based survey is used to assess drivers of faculty engagement and the effectiveness of faculty-related institutional policies and practices in the following domains:
- Nature of Work
- Focus on Medical School Mission
- Workplace Culture
- Department Governance
- Medical School Governance
- Relationship with Supervisor
- Mentoring and Feedback
- Opportunities for Career and Professional Growth
- Promotion and Tenure Requirements
- Promotion Equality
- Collegiality and Collaboration
- Compensation and Benefits
- Faculty Recruitment and Retention
- Faculty Diversity and Inclusion
- Clinical Practice Environment
- Part-time Faculty Experiences
- Global Satisfaction and Retention
In July and August 2026, survey results will be shared with faculty, departments, and SOM and UVA Health System leadership. The results will be collated with the data from the AMA Organizational Biopsy, which pertains to the clinical practice environment.
In response to chair and faculty feedback from previous survey cycles, we have revised and streamlined the post-survey department action planning process, shifting it from finding problems to “fix” and toward understanding what the data means. Once the results are in, departments will be asked to learn more from their faculty about what is most significant to faculty in the data: about what is going well and how to sustain it, and about how they experience challenges and what it may look like if it were improved.
The AAMC takes a number of steps to ensure confidentiality and protect respondents. Faculty participation is voluntary. Respondents may skip any particular question or discontinue the survey at any time. Confidentiality is assured in all StandPoint Surveys analyses and reports. When StandPoint Surveys submits the survey report to UVA, only the aggregate data will be included in the report. No identifiers are matched to reported responses, and no disaggregated data will be presented for any subgroup with fewer than five respondents. In addition, any personally identifiable information will be removed from all responses to open-ended questions.
Engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that a faculty member has for his/her role, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort at work (Gibbons, Conference Board, 2007). Research on engagement indicates that the alignment of engagement and contribution has more robust links with retention and performance outcomes due to personal investment in the success of an organization. Engaged individuals:
- give more than is expected of them in their workplace and are happy to do so
- have a sense of mission and passion that motivate them to give exceptional effort to their work
- need the resources, support, and tools from the organization to act on, or drive, their sense of mission and passion
When action is taken to improve the practices and policies that support the recruitment and retention of faculty, faculty will thrive. Physicians who are engaged with their jobs provide better quality patient care and also foster greater patient satisfaction. More engaged faculty are more likely to remain with the institution.
The SOM undertook StandPoint in 2009, 2015, 2018, and 2022.
In 2022, the SOM achieved a response rate of 87%!