Search for tag: "diversity"

My personal passion is: How do we figure out a way to value and measure the variety of indispensable contributions that our faculty make to schools of medicine? I'm working on how do we revise our retention, promotion, and tenure guidelines to reflect the diversity of things that faculty do that make medical schools fantastic.

My problem is: How do you capture excellence? How do you measure that your faculty member is excellent?

I think part of the barrier is we have a model, that everyone is comfortable in, that doesn't really work, which says there's only one way to demonstrate excellence and that is having NIH grants and publishing and discovery science.

I think the big challenge is to change the culture so that not that we say, "Educational scholarship isn't as good," rather that we say, "Wow, there are faculty doing amazing things that aren't related to NIH and discovery science." They're doing other kinds of scholarships, and we've known for 20 years that we should be counting those other kind of scholarship, and now we're going to change our culture so people say, "That's a really valuable activity."

What I see is that we now encourage people to follow their passion, which then transforms how patients get their care, which then transforms how healthy our population is. I think it's an opportunity to really take us back home and change fundamentally how we deliver health care, because I think everyone would agree it's not yet perfect.

For our leadership to be looking for members of our faculty who may not have leadership positions but who have innovative ideas and will be people who can change how we view our institution is really important.

Most people tend to think about diversity limiting it to race and ethnicity. So at Morehouse School of Medicine we intentionally recruit what we describe as academically diverse students. That means students who don't have the highest GPA or the highest MCAT. We know that if we can get those students who have had different life experiences, and if we can get them to perform just as well as students who have MCAT scores of 31 when they come in, we know that we are now creating a platform for greater success for those students, and for the patients they're going to be caring for.

This is something that I think that all academic health centers should be doing. We all have the responsibility for training the health care professionals that the nations needs. The upside of academically diverse students is that you're giving a broad opportunity for people to participate in the care of patients, the demographics of the nation are changing, and so if we're not responsive to that it's great to have great innovation, and technology, but if it's not useful to the people, then what's the benefit of it.

There's a great quote by Thomas Edison that I love. "If there's a better way, find it."

I think if you have that approach when you look out in the world, you realize that there's always a better way to do what we're doing now. One of the things that's interesting about being in an academic medical center is that you're not just a healthcare delivery system, you have students, and trainees around, and then of course you have many, many researchers.

It's really in that environment is that you can come up with some of the most creative solutions that we need in healthcare, because you have the brilliance of these researchers, and then you're training students, and trainees who are always questioning "Why do we do things this way? Why can't we do it that way? "

Because we have the resources to answer their questions through our researchers, I think we have the opportunity to create whole new ways of thinking that we never did before.

I'm very motivated when I think there's a vision that seems very clear to me, that requires bringing together people from all different backgrounds, from all different perspectives, and getting them to work together successfully.

The value added comes from different backgrounds, different life experiences, trained in different fields of specialty, creativity. And the great new ideas come at those interfaces.

All of us feel a responsibility to train the next generation of researchers, educators, and healthcare providers. As a result we're not just looking at trying to solve the problems today for tomorrow, but we're looking at trying to solve them for years to come.

My highest hopes for the University of Utah are that we really make a difference to the world, we make people better, and healthier, and happier.

The pieces are already here, the talent is already here, what we really need to be able to do is to allow that talent to flourish, and to provide the overall direction for where we want to go. And then kind of step out, get out of the way, and let everyone move us forward.

To know that individually those people are all doing great things, and they're advancing in their own fields, but by bringing everyone in that room together, and to feel those sparks go off, it's incredibly satisfying.

I think in a lot of ways when we talk about diversity, a lot of its kind of bringing different groups together. I feel like for a lot of us that come from schools or opportunities or experiences where we may not be able to progress forward as often as other folks that maybe have the means, that it's an important thing to kind of keep in mind. For me, the only reason I was able to succeed and go through college and really do well and get into medical school was the fact that I had other people that had gone through similar experiences, that had the luck of finding somebody to really reach out to them and pull them up and make sure that this was something that was important for them so that they should continue going with that as well.

All of us are responsible for making sure, as a whole, we take care of each other, so that we don't have someone that should be at the table. How do we get them a seat there?