Medical education is concerned with the training of medical and other health science professionals and its ultimate goal is to contribute to the improvement of the population's health. It is a field that has grown enormously since the 1980s. In its early days it was focused on undergraduate training. Later on, attention was also paid to the training of specialists and, finally, to continuous professional development programmes and activities. This progression includes the three phases of the educational continuum.

Improving the training of health science professionals depends on those professionals who carry out teaching activities (which in a broad sense means all of them, since all health science professionals should carry out teaching of some kind and at some stage of the continuum) having the teaching skills required to successfully address such tasks. However, the question remains as to how and when health professionals are trained in order to develop their teaching skills.

Surprisingly, in Spain, most of the professionals who carry out some kind of teaching are not required to have any training in this respect and neither are there any relevant competences to be developed in the undergraduate degree course or in specialised training. Professionals who include teaching skills in their continuing professional development do so on a voluntary basis, in response to some kind of personal motivation or interest. Only some autonomous communities in Spain require training in teaching skills for accreditation as tutors in specialised training. Thus, professionals who are assigned teaching duties rely on their experience as trainees or on their intuition and common sense to carry out their teaching, rather than on evidence from educational research.

Some administrations, universities, scientific societies and other institutions have designed and carried out faculty development activities. In the English-speaking literature, teacher development programmes and activities are called 'faculty (or staff) development'. One definition of teacher development is that proposed by Yvonne Steinert, a Canadian expert in medical education from McGill University [¹]: 'all activities health professionals pursue to improve their knowledge, skills and behaviors as teachers and educators, leaders and managers, researchers and scholars, in both individual and group settings'. In addition, teacher development can be a useful tool for organisational change. It could also be defined as a planned programme aimed at improving teaching skills in order to correctly perform the various teaching roles.

Health educators are gradually becoming increasingly interested in faculty development. Thus, the first international meeting on faculty development was held in Toronto in 2011. From that year onwards, various meetings on this subject have been held every two years: in 2013, in Prague, within the framework of the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference; in 2015, in Singapore; in 2017, in Helsinki, again within the framework of the AMEE conference; and in 2019, in Ontario. For this reason, we can state that teacher development has become fully accepted within the context of international medical education conferences.

Today, under the general term of 'faculty development', activities go beyond 'teaching teachers to teach' (especially, to transmit information), as was the case in the early days, and they are now based on a wide range of interventions focused on improving the educational climate, educational infrastructure and educational practices within health organisations [²].

Steinert has recently published an article [³] in which she sets out some recommendations for teacher development: broaden the scope of faculty development from teaching to academic development; expand our approaches to faculty development, to include peer coaching, workplace learning and communities of practice; utilize a competency-based framework to guide the development of faculty development curricula; support teachers' professional identities through faculty development; focus on organizational development and change; and rigorously promote research and scholarship in faculty development.

Another sign of the growing interest in this topic is that AMEE, through its Teacher Development Committee, has become interested in promoting research into the development of teaching skills. With a budget of up to £5,000, the committee plans to fund one or more projects in 2020, apart from the creation and design of faculty development programmes and assessment proposals. For its part, the journal Medical Teacher has announced the publication of a special issue of the journal, in July 2021, on research and innovation in health science faculty development.

With all these initiatives, from the Medical Education Foundation we wish to draw attention to the fact that faculty development in medical education is an emerging issue that should be of interest and concern to us in order to ensure our professionals are given the best training.