I was delighted by our last grand rounds led by Drs. Sherita Golden and Lee Biddison. It addressed new efforts to parsimoniously define the purposes and mission of our department, interactively discussed ways to improve the work experience of our clinical faculty and outlined progress and opportunities to more effectively engage our community. I am eager for each of these efforts to expand, and to lead to greater engagement of all members of our department over the coming academic year. This required major organizational effort and hours of communication.
As the director of our department, I spend lots of time in meetings. Most of these are highly structured, and are designed to learn about new opportunities and challenges for our faculty, to promote faculty careers, to recruit and retain faculty, to advocate for resources, to contribute to the success of JHM and to represent the interests of our department to the School of Medicine and health system. I am pleased to announce a plan to provide more opportunities for faculty to communicate with me outside our recurring structured meetings. Beginning in the new academic year, I will hold monthly lunch meetings.
- Every other month I will continue a tradition of inviting faculty, selected at random, to meet one another and to discuss issues of interest, without a theme or agenda.
- On the alternate months, I will send an announcement for faculty to meet and discuss issues important for one of our academic missions. The mission area will be pre-specified, but the discussion will be initiated by comments, suggestions and questions from you. The vice chairs engaged in the mission-specific area will join (as available). The goal of these meetings will be to provide far-ranging and deep discussions on current practice, aspirations and new ideas for executing our missions. The schedule (below) provides dates and times; topics will be announced at least a month in advance, accompanied by an RSVP tool.
I hope to hear from many of you, and look forward to bringing the best ideas forward to further improve the best Department of Medicine!
-Mark
