This commentary examines the professional development challenges and strategies for clinician-educators in respiratory and sleep medicine, covering career pathways, communities of practice, formal education, scholarship, and academic promotion barriers.
Clinician-educators face persistent structural barriers including unclear role definitions, inequitable promotion criteria (documented since at least 1997), and difficulty balancing dual clinical and educational roles; a 2026 Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand position paper calls for systemic national reform to address these gaps.
This is a single-author opinion piece based largely on personal narrative and selected literature; no original data are presented, and findings may not generalise beyond Australasian or anglophone academic medicine contexts.
Clinician-educators should engage early with communities of practice (e.g., specialty society education subcommittees), pursue at least one formal CPD programme annually, and begin building a scholarship of teaching and learning portfolio as soon as possible. Institutions should establish transparent, separate promotion criteria that recognise educational contributions alongside research output.
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