|
|
|
President’s Address
"Culture and the Courage to Change"
Darrell G. Kirch, M.D.
AAMC President and CEO
In his address to the AAMC 2007 annual meeting, AAMC President and CEO Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., urged the leadership of the nation’s medical schools and teaching hospitals to change the culture of academic medicine by emphasizing "collaboration, shared accountability, and team performance." Kirch’s remarks, "Culture and the Courage to Change," were presented before a record 4,000 attendees.
Recognizing that this culture change will require courage, Kirch stressed the potential for this shift to create "a much more meaningful and gratifying culture for our faculty, staff, learners, and especially the patients they have committed to serve."
While medical schools and teaching hospitals have expended considerable effort on growth strategies because of constraints in state and federal support over the past 10 years, a "failure to put at least as much energy into improving our culture as we put into advancing our strategy," according to Kirch, "has led to a fundamental imbalance within our institutions."
"While higher education and health care have held fast to their traditional, individualistic culture," Kirch noted that the world has fundamentally changed to a greater emphasis on collaborative, coordinated, and integrative efforts in research, patient care, and medical education.
|
