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BACKGROUND: Because of the increasing work demands posed by the new supervisory requirements of IL 372, coupled with budget constraints resulting from decreasing external grant funding and shrinking practice revenues, departments must weigh workplace needs against faculty resources. Following a period of faculty shortage, the Department of Family Medicine at East Carolina University expected to achieve balance in staffing its department's clinical services, teaching obligations, and scholarly activities once additional faculty were hired. While relief from work obligations was noted once new hires were in place, there remained inadequate faculty to meet all the identified demands of the department. METHODS: To deal with this dilemma, a new approach was created to assess workforce availability and workload demands. Instead of assuming faculty availability based on an average daily or monthly schedule, an actual assessment of faculty availability and workload demands was performed. The method calculated the actual availability and work demands using weeks per year as the unit of measure, i.e., I half day per week of precepting requires 5.2 faculty weeks per year, and an average full-time faculty member is available 45 work weeks per year when vacation, national holidays, and departmental/educational leave time is accounted for. By calculating total weeks of departmental work demands and comparing to faculty availability, a true number of faculty members needed by a department can be accurately determined. RESULTS: During the period in question at East Carolina University, a comparison of work demands and faculty availability revealed that the department needed 2.8 additional faculty to cover the existing work requirements. If time were provided for leadership/management, research, and other administrative activities, then the actual need was for 8.25 additional faculty members. CONCLUSIONS: To meet the increasing time demands on faculty in academic medical centers, departments need to have an accurate accounting of both workforce availability and work demands. The faculty workload assessment model described in this report can be used to generate such an accounting.