AAMC Reporter, September 2000: Spotlight: Group on Institutional Advancement

VOLUME 9, NUMBER 12

JORDAN J. COHEN, M.D., PRESIDENT

SEPTEMBER 2000

Group on Institutional Advancement

by Meredith Moller

The AAMC's 12 professional development groups are the point of entry for many AAMC constituents. Each month this year, the AAMC Reporter will describe a group's activities.

Public understanding of and support for America's medical schools and teaching hospitals is more important than ever. Without public backing, academic medical center priorities such as securing BBA relief become difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In turn, without effective institutional advancement strategies, medical schools and teaching hospitals cannot make the public aware of the financial crises they face or of the many contributions they bring both to their communities and to health care in general.

The AAMC's Group on Institutional Advancement (GIA) fosters the professional growth of development, marketing, alumni, and public affairs professionals in their endeavors to enhance public awareness, understanding, and support for medical education, research, and patient care. Comprised of more than 800 members appointed by the leaders of medical schools and teaching hospitals, the GIA helps a diverse range of professionals navigate a rapidly changing environment.

"The role of GIA members has become more complex with the competitiveness of the health care market, the explosion of new communications technology, and the remarkable increase of patient empowerment," says Patricia S. Green, assistant vice president for the AAMC's Office of Communications and executive secretary of the GIA.

Don L. Gibbons, chair of the GIA and associate dean for Public Affairs at Harvard Medical School, stresses that the group's members need to be prepared to meet newadvocacy challenges. "We need to remind our leadership about the complexity and financial needs necessary for institutional advancement in the marketplace," he says.

The GIA's national professional development conference provides a forum for helping members master these new challenges. This year's meeting, held in March in Seattle, explored emerging trends in health care, fundraising, academic medical center financing, and medical ethics.

The GIA also works in collaboration with the AAMC on several ongoing initiatives to help its members raise public awareness, including "Tomorrow's Doctors, Tomorrow's Cures," a national education campaign aimed at increasing knowledge about the nation's medical schools and teaching hospitals.

Gibbons explains that the initiative, which started as a means of developing synergy between the AAMC's national advocacy efforts and those of its members, has evolved the academic medical community's ability to exchange ideas and tactics for communicating its messages through grassroots advocacy, issue advertising, and other special efforts.

Project Medical Education, a dynamic program that brings legislators and their staff into medical schools and teaching hospitals to learn firsthand about medical education, is another initiative in which the GIA members play a central part. The project, which Gibbons describes as an "integrated effort to make the complexity and resource intensity of medical education today better understood on Capitol Hill," was first launched by Duke University and will transfer to the AAMC's control next July.

GIA members also benefit from the group's annual Awards for Excellence competition, resource and membership directories, annual meeting held in conjunction with the AAMC national meeting, Web site, and special news alert mailings.

Gibbons says that it's the GIA members' dedication that makes these programs successful. "The commitment of volunteers from the schools and the rotating leadership positions foster collaboration and success."

Information; Patricia S. Green, (202) 828-0456