http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/

This map validates so many of our efforts at UC Davis Health System and UC Davis. Our colleagues throughout the University of California share a vision of advancing health in all ways and for all Californians. This map helps define where health disparities are greatest.

It gives me great pleasure to know that I made a difference in their lives. This motivates me to do even more, like serving on the board of the American Cancer Society and creating the UC Davis Health System team for their Relay for Life on April 13.

Please join the UC Davis Health System Relay for Life team, or consider a donation to the team, by visiting http://bit.ly/YnO9Yg.

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/diversity/wims_12.html

This year, with more than 90 abstracts submitted, the Symposium Committee had a tough time selecting which ones to accept for posters or podium presentations. It’s a good problem to have. We were pleased to see the increase in quality initiatives as well as the diversity in project teams, including more Pharmacology residents and Nursing Science and Health-Care Leadership graduate program students. 

I hope you will join us to hear from our keynote speakers. Brenda Zierler, Professor at the University of Washington School of Nursing and School of Medicine, will speak about interprofessional education and collaborative practice as approaches to improve the quality and safety of health care.  

Heather M. Young, Associate Vice Chancellor for Nursing, UC Davis Health System, and Founding Dean, Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, will share insights on person-centered care coordination and promoting quality.

 Full details, including the agenda and how to register with our Office of Continuing Medical Education, are available here: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/quality/index.html.

This year, we are very pleased to offer continuing education for participants at the Integrating Quality Symposium: Linking Clinical and Educational Excellence on March 12, 2013. Physician Credit: The University of California, Davis Health System designates this live activity for a maximum of 5.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. AMA PRA Category 1 credit acceptable for multidisciplinary team members included nurses, physician assistants, veterinarians and pharmacists. Further details are noted on the Symposium web page link above.

Now more than ever we want to invest in ourselves, in clinical excellence, in high-impact research and research training, and innovative health-science education. Of course, these lofty goals come at a time when the University of California is being asked to change how we do business. I see us managing all of these tensions together so that we continue to make a big difference in our communities. This unified approach supports Strategy 6.3 of the health system’s Strategic Plan: Transparent, Strategic Decision-Making.

The rewards and resources are constantly changing. For a good read on managing change in both your work and life, I recommend “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson, M.D.

I enjoy our UC Davis family and trust us to work together.

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

I have admired her passion for social justice and advancing health for all. Her leadership has raised the bar for UC Davis Health System, with record high research funding and programs that make a difference in our community, to name a few of her accomplishments. I know she will make a difference in our nation’s health care system. I look forward to hearing about her accomplishments in the coming years.

As noted in the public announcements, a transition plan will be announced. Change isn’t easy, but the good news is that UC Davis Health System is poised to achieve even greater heights, thanks to Claire Pomeroy.

http://www.hhnmag.com/hhnmag/HHNDaily/HHNDailyDisplay.dhtml?id=5300008224

“Each year, the Association of American Medical Colleges surveys the new class of matriculating students nationwide on a variety of subjects, including what influenced them in their decisions to become doctors. In 2011 — the most recent survey — four in seven cited as a positive motivation “anticipated salary.”

To be fair, the remainder said money was not a lure, and many more — almost 80 percent — declared that the “competitiveness/challenge” of medicine had been a major attractant. (The listed career influences were not mutually exclusive.) Besides, says Tonya Fancher, M.D., of the University of California Davis School of Medicine, the lucrative options in business and finance available to the kind of top academic performers who opt for medical schools suggest that, “If your goal is to make a lot of money, medicine is not really the way to go.”

Fancher, a primary general internist and educator herself, knows whereof she speaks. And she has a strong reason for hoping her students aren’t just motivated by the big bucks. She directs the Transforming Education and Community Health for Medical Students program at Davis, whose focus is expanding medical student interest and involvement in serving inner-city populations. She’s also the associate director for curriculum for the UC Merced San Joaquin Valley PRIME program, which is similarly oriented toward encouraging primary care careers in rural areas.

Davis has long been a medical school with an emphasis on graduating primary care physicians. But efforts to steer more students into primary care — internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics or obstetrics/gynecology — despite the allure of such better paid specialties as neurosurgery, cardiology or urology, are in full swing across the country, according to Carol Aschenbrener, chief medical education officer at the AAMC in Washington, DC.

Clinical experience in primary care and ambulatory settings is now a requirement at all U.S. schools, she points out. Eighty of them have clinical campuses in smaller cities where students can gain exposure to the relationship-based satisfactions of primary care — as opposed, she notes, to the usually briefer, shallower and more intermittent patient contacts that characterize most specialty practices.”