This paper outlines the essentials that each organizer of Faculty and Staff Development (FSD) programs in Health Professions Education should focus on when designing a program. The essentials are as follows: the reasons for studying at FDS, the place of practice, content, participants, peers, location, methods, timing, and evidence of learning. These will also help FSD participants think about their perspectives when they choose to participate in the program. It is hoped that more people will get involved in Health Professions Education to increase their knowledge and spice up their daily teaching practice. It is also hoped that those who complete the course will become Faculty Developers in their own areas and professions, revitalizing health professions education and cooperatively increasing the presence of Japanese Health Professions Education.

　The Medical Education Specialist Certified Coursework, which has been officially in operation since 2014, has produced 181 specialists to date. In response to the globalization of medical education, the program has established a system to foster specialists who can work to improve education in accordance with international standards at each educational institution. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 made it impossible to hold face-to-face lessons, forcing the organizers to reform the course. The course resumed in February 2021 as a full online course. Moodle was used as the learning platform, and lectures and group work were conducted via Zoom. There were no major connection problems, and the results of the post-course questionnaire showed a high level of satisfaction and usefulness of the learning. To make this course a good practice for a new era in education, the strengths of both face-to-face and online methods should be incorporated.

　HANDS-FDF (Home and Away Nine DayS-Faculty Development Fellowship) is probably the first home and away format, continuous faculty development program for primary care physicians deliberately developed by officially FD trained director based on the existing successful programs and pilot testing by officially FD trained director. This fellowship has many unique features with 146 stellar graduates and 15 year history. Other prospective course developer may benefit from studying this course in detail.

　Foundation Program in Medical Education organized by Kyoto University since 2015, previously funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), is a program that combines face-to-face and distance learning to develop medical education training systematically. The students (or clinical teachers), who study about 120 hours a year, form a strong learning community, which is the envy of the supervisors, with their 12 peers. In addition, the program is characterized by its emphasis on educational philosophy and cultural anthropology.

　Residents have teaching roles in clinical practice, and the importance of these roles has been pointed out. This is due to their proximity to learners as Near-Peers. There are two aspects to consider: cognitive proximity, which allows them to share what learners don’t know, and spatial proximity, which allows us to share time and space for an extended period. Residents-as-teachers programs, which aim to improve teaching skills for residents, are being developed all over the world, but are still rare in Japan. We are conducting research to determine what teaching competencies residents should have. We are running a one-year fellowship based on the results of that research. The scale of the program has gradually increased, and in 2020, due to COVID-19, the fellowship went online. We restructured the fellowship in terms of Study/Workload, Enhancing Engagement, and Technical Issues. We received high satisfaction ratings for the online implementation.

　The Hawaii-Okinawa Medical Education Fellowship is a longitudinal FD program developed and administered by the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii and Okinawa Prefecture to train young clinical teachers who will play a central role in residency education. The program also supports the building of networks among clinical teachers. Each year, around six participants learn the skills required of clinical teachers through monthly seminar participation and a year-round curriculum development project. To date, about 60 physicians have completed the fellowship, and many of them are active as clinical teachers at medical institutions in Okinawa. The community of practice consisting of the graduates of this fellowship is gradually expanding. It is expected to contribute more and more to the enhancement of clinical education in Okinawa.

　Over the past 20 years, the Center for Medical Education Development Center, Gifu University has been working on training medical educators across the country. The Center offers a wide variety of programs to meet participants’ various needs and levels, targeting medical educators and administrative staff in various fields such as dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. This paper introduces the “Medical Education Starter Kit,” “Fellowship Program,” and “Master’s Course of Health Professions Education” among the programs. The objectives, target participants, and features of each program are outlined, including future prospects.

　For this second report, we divided the efforts of the University of Tsukuba into two parts. In the first part, we introduced the Interprofessional program, an inter-university collaborative educational program between the University of Tsukuba and Ibaraki Prefectural University of Health Sciences. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was conducted using TBL (Team-based learning) in a large conference room. After the pandemic, this was conducted online (using Zoom). The main changes due to the online implementation were the following five points; (1) online faculty meetings, (2) advance distribution of materials, (3) testing using Google Forms, (4) group work using the breakout function, and (5) simultaneous editing using Google Docs. In the future, we would like to examine the possibility of new educational methods while creating innovations that are possible only through online interprofessional educational programs.

　In the second part of the second report, we introduce the Care Colloquium, an inter-university collaborative educational program between the University of Tsukuba and the Tokyo University of Science. The Care Colloquium is an interprofessional education program that uses PBL (Problem-based learning). In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was implemented online using Microsoft Teams, with advance preparation including manual maintenance and communication testing. The same learning outcomes were achieved as the face-to-face implementation. Undergraduate interprofessional education tends to be a large-scale program, and the shortage of faculty and classrooms is challenging, but online education could overcome these obstacles. The development of hybrid programs that use the merits of both face-to-face and online education may lead to the promotion of interprofessional education in the future.