The Association of American Medical Colleges launched a campaign in November to help federal policymakers and influencers better understand, appreciate and support the value its institutions provide. In this month’s Dean Termuhlen’s Take On …, Dr. Termuhlen talks about why WMed is participating in this campaign and why it is important.
In your opinion, why is it important for WMed to participate in this campaign?
It’s important for us to participate because it helps raise understanding about what it means to be part of the academic medicine community. This translates locally into our community understanding why having a medical school in Kalamazoo can be such a benefit to Southwest Michigan and across the country.
What do you want federal policymakers and others to know about WMed and the value of academic medicine?
Our federal policymakers are members of our communities. Many people think medical schools have a single mission to produce physicians, but we, in fact, have four missions – education, clinical care, research, and community engagement. At the beginning of the pandemic, as soon as medical schools across the country understood the magnitude of the problem, people went to work in their laboratories, in their clinics, and in their classrooms to design the solutions to help us to deal with immediate needs within the pandemic.
Across the nation, all the treatments that were developed originated out of academic medicine. This was an incredible partnership with our healthcare industries to bring vaccines out immediately and design equipment that could be used on a portable basis in a very short period. In addition, academic medical centers across the country were able to provide the physician workforce that could understand the complexity of COVID-19.
WMed did what it is designed to do. It started to engage with our community about its needs. While we may not have developed the vaccines, we were there to deliver them as soon as we possibly could. Our faculty and residents with our hospital partners, Ascension Borgess and Bronson were on the front line, providing care for acutely ill patients. We supported the public health infrastructure in Kalamazoo and Calhoun counties with the medical director, Dr. Will Nettleton, who is a member of our faculty, and we volunteered at Kalamazoo County COVID-19 immunization clinics. The other area in academic medicine in which we excel is our educational mission and the fact that our students have, through active citizenship and as medical first responders, the ability to directly impact the community. We saw that during the pandemic. Even though we may not all look alike as medical schools, we have an incredible amount of talent and skill we can bring to bear on the toughest problems in healthcare today. In addition, we bring a multitude of approaches of how to help solve those problems.
This AAMC campaign highlights three ways academic medicine helps patients and saves lives: through driving breakthroughs, shaping the future of medicine and advancing patient care. How is WMed contributing in each of these areas? Can you provide some specific examples?
We drive breakthroughs in research with our laboratory scientists that are on our W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus, particularly those in the Center for Immunobiology. In addition, we can help drive breakthroughs by understanding our patient populations with the development of a virtual data warehouse. In clinical care, integration with our hospital partners on the front lines allowed us to deliver care for patients in addition to the work we were doing at our WMed Health clinics. We also provided ethics consultations for our hospital partners. During the pandemic, our faculty led the development of protocols to address potential equipment and hospital bed shortages. Leading that effort during a time when resources were being prioritized and helping to create processes so we could equitably distribute precious resources was a critical component of our participation in how we forward the mission around clinical care.
In education, we’re contributing to the academic medicine milieu by structuring our curriculum to meet the needs of today’s students. We’re thinking a lot about the experiences they need to become physicians who understand their communities in addition to delivering care. The work that we’re doing as an institution related to diversity, equity and inclusion is helping us think deeply about the struggle in American healthcare today to develop a workforce that understands and reflects the people we serve. We’re spending a lot of time right now making sure our students aren’t just the brightest and most compassionate but also have the greatest depth of understanding about what their patients face outside the clinic.
One of the things that excites me about this campaign and why it’s so timely for us is that it will help everyone realize we are part of something larger than ourselves. As they see some of the information that comes out, I hope members of our WMed community feel pride that they are part of academic medicine. It’s important for us to engage with our local, state, and federal policymakers to help them understand how we contribute to the care of the communities we serve.
How can federal policymakers and the public support WMed and academic medicine?
It’s a two-pronged approach. It takes a lot of resources to provide the care for our communities, to develop the physicians that we train and to have what we need to help perform the groundbreaking research that constitutes academic medicine. We must ensure we have those resources and continue to tell our stories so that we can help our policymakers make the best decisions possible. In return, we need the respect of the skillset we bring to the table around healthcare. We have to figure out ways that allow us to do the job of taking care of people at their most vulnerable moments without our government getting in the way of it. One thing they can do is listen to us, learn from us and then allow us to do what they entrusted us to do. Let us do it in the best way possible for that patient.
Who would you like to recognize for your Hat Tip?
I’d like to recognize our donors, many of whom attended our annual Donor Appreciation Luncheon on November 10. We literally can’t do what we do without them. As a private school we are highly dependent upon our incredibly generous financial donors, but in addition to that, we have a huge amount of gratitude for everyone who contributes with their time, talent, and treasure to advance the four missions that we serve in academic medicine at WMed.
Dean Termuhlen’s Take On ... is a monthly message from our dean to discuss topics of importance to WMed, medical school stakeholders, and the communities that make up Southwest Michigan. Is there a topic you would like to hear Dean Termuhlen’s take on? Let us know by sending a message to office.dean@wmed.edu.