Search for tag: "leadership"

A role of the leader of the organization can simply be to set a tone that indicates that it's okay to be innovative, it's okay to take risks, and if you are and you have some success, that's going to be recognized. That counts as much as the traditional things in academic medicine.

The models of how we provide healthcare to our patients, how we interact with our patients need to change. Also the models in the way we educate our students need to change. It's been very traditional. Institutions across the decades have changed. Course content has changed the way it's delivered.

But by and large, we're still heavily lecture-based. We should have programs where students can move onto the next subject once they've shown that they're competent in some area, rather than having to finish the semester in that particular class. You know, we're locked into these fixed time scales. Those sorts of models of education need to improve.

Then, also, the learner environment, I think, is also something that suffers from these traditions that we have in medicine. Students pick up a lot of subtle signs about how physicians interact in these environments. Not all of them are good.

There's something called the hidden curriculum, sort of what the students see and hear and experience in addition to what they're actually being taught. Sometimes the messages we're sending in those sorts of learner environments are not the best as well.

The practice of medicine now is very different than what it was when many started their practice of medicine. For some, the feeling is that it's changed for the worse. But if you look at the young students that are coming in who haven't known the previous environment, and the excitement level, and quite honestly, the competency level of the new students coming in is just astounding.

I think that spirit of enthusiasm of a bright future, it's going to be a different future, but it's going to be a bright future. The tools, the power that we have, that hopefully we can harness for the betterment of our patients, is just stronger now than it's ever been in the past.

We like stories, we like storylines. When I write a paper, I always write it in terms of a story. Not because that's the way life is, but because that's the way we think. When we started gene targeting what it does is inactivate one gene at a time. No story is one gene. It's always the interaction of many genes together that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

My end is always understanding. I'm excited when all of a sudden I understand something that I didn't understand before. And that is what makes science exciting, when you know all of a sudden, you see something that nobody else has seen before. My feeling is always push, push, push understanding. Push basic research and translation will automatically follow.

Science is interesting because it entails almost two completely opposite skills. One is flights of imagination. You have to think about things that don't exist and why they don't exist. It's that kind of mentality that allows you to jump into areas where the solutions aren't clear, that they look impossible. You simply have to extend yourself into them and then make it possible. On the other hand, if you want experiments to work, you have to work extremely diligently and pay attention to detail which is a completely opposite skill. A successful scientist has to have both.

Each one of us sees the world from our own eyes because of our training and because of our experiences, and everybody else is seeing it from slightly different eyes. I think the cross mashing of that is where new things can arise.

If you want to really be innovative, you're almost working at the edge of science fiction because at that point people are willing to have flights of imagination. One of the aphorisms that I was raised on, "The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer." It takes the same amount of effort to work on big questions as little questions. So why not work on big questions?

I took care of adolescent leukemia patients for eight years. And that's a really difficult thing to do. I cannot tell you that it was less difficult for me on the last day than it was on the first day.

I was taught that gradually you become less sensitive to the patient situation if you take care of patients in desperate situations. I found that to be totally untrue.

The purpose of healthcare is to make a person as healthy as possible. And if that is perfect health, great. There are times in people's lives when that's no longer possible, but to keep them at their highest functioning level, and as happy as they can be for as long as possible. The goal of health care is not just to do that, but to find out what that means for the patient, and do that.

I see all of these things as an opportunity, and how do we take the situation we're in, and help turn it into something that's really great. When we talk about patient experience for example, the patient has a head injury doesn't think of patient experience in the same way as a mother who has just given birth. You can't have a formula for the whole hospital. Everybody does it differently.

What we do here at nursing is we have the right people, and that's not easy. We have to hire people who've got a passion for what they're doing.

We started out with a top down approach, and of course that doesn't work, and I know that doesn't work. So what we said was you take care of patients everyday, you know what your patients need, and I know that you want to make the best possible care that we can for them. Tell me what the barriers are, and my job is to remove the barriers so that you can provide that kind of care for your patient everyday.

I don't dictate anything. I don't tell people what they have to do. I tell them what the goal is, I try to inspire them that the goal is worthy, and then I ask them to think through what's the best option for their staff, and their patients. Then that's how we get all of our innovation.

Most of the things that we do, I had no idea that that's the way it's going to come out. I'm always thrilled to death to see what they come up with. They come up with some fabulous ideas that I never would have thought of. It's imperative that the patient is at the front of all of our conversations. It's all for the patient.

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 do feel a sense of urgency about solving some of these problems. I don't really think it's acceptable to . . . I don't really think it's acceptable that some people don't get the care that they need.

My interaction with the health system is very rich and deep, both as a recipient and someone who offers care to others.

We are in a position where we actually do help people. Sometimes it's one on one. Sometimes it's a very simple thing like holding someone's hand or extending an arm around a shoulder in a really difficult time.

When I started as a nurse, back in the early '70s, children's leukemia, Wilms' tumors, they were almost universally fatal, and now we look to people with these diagnoses to families and young children and we can talk about the hope of being almost always curable, and that is an amazing experience. If we could just deliver that to every single person in this country, just think how strong we would be as a nation.

What we have to confront in our own nation is: Do we have a national commitment to funding research to improve health?

Well, imagine if we have a population that's not healthy, that doesn't have access to the best care that science underpinned. Imagine that absent science we have no idea what works best for whom, in what context, and why.

So how can we confront those challenges? The power of science brings an evidence base to that that really separates it from unguarded or unfounded opinion. So once we have the power of science, we can think about health in terms of improving the health of an individual patient but also of that patient's family, of the community, and the population, many of whom are vulnerable. And I think once we talk about reframing that for innovation as to improving health through all of those, then some of our other challenges may fall away.

I don't know that we've ever, in the course of human history, designed anything that was perfect and could last forever. We need to be ready for change.

As the old joke goes, people will say, "Change is good. You go first." What I see being different now is the people not only acknowledge that change is important and it's good, but more and more of them are willing to go first.

I see groups of institutions forming coalitions that will work on big change, transformational efforts, in their own institution. When that starts to happen, it will ripple throughout academic medicine, and healthcare in general.

The issue isn't competing against each other. The issue is we all have very similar mission statements. We want to improve the health of the public, and that's a big challenge.

Sadly, in many ways, the U.S. healthcare system is broken. We have great medicine. We have great surgeries, great medications and tests. But the system isn't working. And so, more and more what I see the people at this meeting thinking about isn't, "Where do I stand relative to anybody else," but, "Are we innovating? Are we changing ourselves in a way that we really can start to improve the health of the country."

We bring together people from all parts of the medical school, research, teaching, the administration, together with the health system. It's a place where the community really can come together and share ideas. I would argue there's never been a time when we need more new ideas to help us meet the challenges we face.

People who are coming to this meeting are going to leave more ready to push for change, to exert leadership, to argue for innovation on their home campus. All boats will rise together, and eventually we will create a tipping point where I think people will look at academic medical centers in this country ten years from now and say, "We were in trouble when it came to healthcare, and they led the solution.”