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Dear colleague,
We had a very productive meeting of The Children’s Affiliation
Committee this past week. That committee agreed to finalize
the draft document we have been developing for the last year
and bring it to our respective governance groups over the next
several months. The hope would be to have the document approved
and signed by the beginning of the coming academic year. It
would be premature for me to comment on the document here, but
I can tell you that our School and Children’s went into
this process with the full intention of clarifying our relationship
across all parts of our mission and have pledged to not only
work closely with each other but mutually to support each other’s
core principles. I have already heard from some faculty that
they are unhappy with one of the parts of the document. I urge
patience until we get the draft pulled together and circulated
so that it can be considered as a whole. There are few negotiations
that leave everyone either getting all that they want, or being
happy with everything they get.
There was ample news coverage of the ceremony marking the VA
Medical Center’s acquisition of the Fitzsimons Redevelopment
Authority (FRA) land so I won’t reiterate it other than
say it was really a nice event. Mayor Ed Tauer of Aurora emceed
the event and set the tone with his excitement that this had
finally happened. VA Secretary Jim Nicholson talked about the
importance of our mission to care for those who have served
and defended our country, and as a Coloradoan how pleased he
was that this move was happening. Governor Bill Ritter spoke
eloquently about the importance of this move for our School
of Medicine. Senator Wayne Allard, who along with Senator Ben
Nighthorse Campbell before him, shepherded the appropriation
through Congress, and Congressman Mark Udall spoke about the
bipartisan collaboration of our congressional delegation to
make this happen. One of the better lines of the day came when
President Hank Brown spoke after all the others and said: “It
is true that everything has been said, but not everyone has
said it.” We all owe a great deal to every one of these
individuals (and a number of others like Dennis Brimhall) for
a really significant political effort.
The VA now owns the 20+ acres north of the University Physicians’
building and parking lot. They will begin to do the planning,
design and architectural work to get the building started. UPI
still owns its land and building and is in three way negotiations
with the FRA to identify land north of the Anschutz Medical
Campus and with the VA, which will purchase the UPI land and
building to allow UPI to build a new facility. Lilly Marks will
be leading those negotiations for UPI.
I have provided draft letters of offer to Naresh Mandava, MD,
Interim Chair of Ophthalmology and to Chris Raetz, MD, PhD,
who is a candidate for Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
The searches for chairs of Radiology and Cellular and Structural
Biology and Senior Associate Dean for Education are getting
underway.
Lynn Yancey, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery (Emergency
Medicine), and I had our sixth and last session of “The
Hidden Curriculum” with the third year students. For those
of you not familiar with this program, it was started eight
years ago by Brian Dwinnell, MD, now Associate Clinical Professor
of Medicine, as part of the Foundations in Doctoring curriculum
when he served as director. Ten third-year students, two fourth-years
and two faculty meet six times a year for a couple of hours
to discuss the students’ perceptions of the behaviors
they encounter while journeying through the clerkships, the
experiences that have impacted them positively or negatively
with patients, residents, nursing staff and faculty, and how
these experiences feed into their decision about career choice.
It is terrific to see how our students grow and develop from
the “stem cell students” they are at the beginning
of the year and begin differentiating into the internists, surgeons,
family physicians, pediatricians, neurologists and psychiatrists
of the future. (I know there are other specialties out there,
but those are the ones our group of students are becoming).
As I have listened to these students this year (and the seven
groups the years before) I admire their ability to navigate
through our many affiliated hospitals with very different electronic
medical record systems, their resilience in dealing with difficult
patients and sometimes very difficult residents, nurses and
faculty, and through it all, maintaining their enthusiasm for
medicine as a career and their personal equanimity.
I had the opportunity to have breakfast Saturday morning with
Rod Nairn, PhD. Rod has joined UCD as Vice Chancellor for
University Initiatives. His responsibilities include making
the consolidation a reality and overseeing the transition to
the Anschutz Medical Campus. We had a good talk. He knows schools
of medicine well, having served as Interim Dean of Creighton’s
Medical School for two years from 1996-1998. I look forward
to working with him and I think all of us will find him to be
helpful.
Finally, congratulations to Rui Zhao, PhD, Assistant Professor
of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, who is one of fifteen
Kimmel Scholars. The Stanley Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research
had 170 applicants and Rui is one of fifteen selected to receive
$100,000 a year for two years to support cancer research.
Have a good week.
With warm regards,
Richard D. Krugman, MD
Dean
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