January 6, 2025


Dear School of Medicine Community,

 

​Welcome to the Year 2025! I hope everyone had a restful holiday break with their families and friends. I appreciate the hard work of so many of you over the holiday season, taking care of our patients and managing one of the busiest times of the year as respiratory pathogens begin to spread. I am joining our clinicians this week for a stint in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. This work allows me to really experience first-hand the challenges with hospital-based care and the amazing quality of service from our staff, trainees, and physicians. I always take some personal time over the holiday season to reflect on our values, the strategy for the School of Medicine, and on a personal level, my own health and relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. This process helps with my resilience and grit, but also energizes me for the opportunities that lay before us in 2025.

 

I would like to share two things that will prepare me for my time in the intensive care unit this week, and more generally for our strategic planning in 2025. The first is a short perspective written by Sarah McCarthy, PhD, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the December 5, 2024 issue. Dr. McCarthy is a pediatric-psychologist in an academic medical center and lost her five-year-old daughter to glioblastoma. As both a mother experiencing unspeakable tragedy and a clinician, she describes how her process of care has been forever changed. She now more purposefully works to consider the individual person in medical notes, she takes more time to understand her patient's life outside of the hospital, and she strives to cultivate what she calls practical compassion, attempting to marry the efficient process of care with the provision of some basic personal needs of her patients. Finally, she now appreciates how important it is for us to sit, listen, and share with our patients and family all the darkness of their unspeakable tragedies, not to provide solutions, but to somehow absorb the loss and in doing so provide space to accept and heal. She writes:

 

“…learn how to sit with darkness, while allowing for light. I have learned from grief. I am more comfortable sitting with darkness, anger, and gut-wrenching pain. I go to those dark places to be present with others who are in them, to bear witness. To not turn away from their pain, from their big uncomfortable emotions. I don’t try to fix a pain I know is unbearable, but I let parents know that they are not alone, that their love for their child is seen, and their grief is witnessed. I also allow myself to put that darkness down for a bit to continue functioning, to smile and laugh, to be present, to connect. This work now sustains me in new ways. I have shifted from practicing with empathy — hurting for my patients — to practicing with compassion, seeing their hurt and responding, sometimes with a specific intervention and always by seeing them, being present with them, recognizing our shared humanity.”

 

I will do my very best to carry some of this with me to the bedside in our MICU.

 

I also read a book called World Class, written by William Haseltine, PhD that was recommended to me by my good friend Joon Lee, MD, who is the CEO of Emory Health. I was so impressed with the story that I shared it with our chairs and academic leaders. The book highlights a transformation at NYU Langone Health from 2007 to 2019, and I was impressed by how they shared many of our current challenges, especially in quality, need for outpatient growth, philanthropy, and research rankings. I believe this book provides a blueprint for success in many ways, and reinforces many of the guiding principles we have focused on over the last two years, such as:

 

  • Setting a vision and mission of excellence and transformation across our tripartite mission, and community, as we work to be world class!
  • Embracing a culture of continuous improvement, which requires leading with urgency and focusing on managing change.
  • Providing leadership that is engaged, energetic, embracing change and committed to operational strategies to ensure the right change.
  • Improving alignment between our faculty practice and our hospital leadership. While we have a separate CEO and a dean/FPI president, our focus and objective are alignment, with shared incentives and joint management teams.
  • Leveraging the power of data: analytics, metrics, dashboards, milestones. The data keeps us honest and provides focus for our investments of time and resources across all missions.
  • Embracing accountability with new research expectations and incentive plans to increase research funding, and clinical expectations and incentive plans to improve patient outcomes and efficiencies.
  • Expanding access to medical education through patient- and student-centered education.
  • Striving to more effectively communicate, with structured strategic planning meetings, town halls, newsletters, and vertical and horizontal transparent communication of data and shared goals.
  • Working to break down silos, with new institutes, shared goals, shared metrics and milestones, empowered leadership with shared investments and incentives. 
  • Focusing on unregulated ambulatory care expansion, with enhanced APP partnerships, access to our clinics, improved operations in imaging, testing, quality, and negotiated payor rates.

 

I looked back over the simple slide deck I presented to faculty during my first year at 40+ mini-retreats, and the words on each slide still align with foundational principles that can drive our success, even after two years of hard work:

 

  • Faculty and staff first
  • Engagement
  • Leverage our rarefied environment
  • Service to community
  • Enhance translational research pathways
  • Data, data, data
  • Access, access, access
  • No margin, no mission
  • Excellence

 

As we look to the new year, I hope this shared perspective can help all of us in our personal approaches to education, research, and patient care as we advance our shared goals and ambitions.

 

Thank you for all you do! Happy New Year!

With enthusiasm and commitment,

Mark T. Gladwin, MD (He/him/his)

Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine

Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore

John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean