Reducing perceived barriers to nursing homes data entry in the advancing excellence campaign: the role of LANEs (Local Area Networks for Excellence).

Purpose: Advancing Excellence (AE) is a coalition-based campaign concerned with how society cares for its elderly and disabled citizens. The purpose of this project was to work with a small group of volunteer nursing homes and with local quality improvement networks called LANEs (Local Area Networks for Excellence) in 6 states in a learning collaborative. The purpose of the collaborative was to determine effective ways for LANEs to address and mitigate perceived barriers to nursing home data entry in the national Advancing Excellence campaign and to test methods by which local quality improvement networks could support nursing homes as they enter data on the AE Web site.

'Flying below the radar': a qualitative study of minority experience and management of discrimination in academic medicine.

Objectives: This paper aims to give voice to the lived experience of faculty members who have encountered racial or ethnic discrimination in the course of their academic careers. It looks at how they describe the environment for minorities, how they manage discrimination and what institutions and majority-member faculty can do to improve medical academe for minority members.

Methods: Qualitative techniques were used for semi-structured, in-depth individual telephone interviews, which were audiotaped, transcribed and analysed by reviewers.

Negotiation in academic medicine: a necessary career skill.

Aims: Negotiation and its use in academic medicine have not been studied. Little is known about faculty experience with negotiation or its potential benefits for academe. Barriers to negotiation and how they can be addressed, especially for faculty without perceived skill in negotiation, are unknown.

A "ton of feathers": gender discrimination in academic medical careers and how to manage it.

Purpose: To evaluate the experience of gender discrimination among a limited sample of women in academic medicine, specifically, the role of discrimination in hindering careers, coping mechanisms, and perceptions of what institutions and leaders of academic medicine can do to improve the professional workplace climate for women.

Methods: In-depth, semistructured telephonic individual interviews of 18 women faculty who experienced or may have experienced discrimination in the course of their professional academic medical careers from 13 of the 24 institutions of the National Faculty Survey. A consensus taxonomy for classifying content evolved from comparisons of coding.

"Having the right chemistry": a qualitative study of mentoring in academic medicine.

Purpose: To develop a deeper understanding of mentoring by exploring lived experiences of academic medicine faculty members. Mentoring relationships are key to developing productive careers in academic medicine, but such alliances hold a certain "mystery."

Method: Using qualitative techniques, between November 1999 and March 2000, the authors conducted individual telephone interviews of 16 faculty members about their experiences with mentoring.