Who Are We?
- We are part of a university, but some of the traditions of the university seem to clash with our go-go business imperative.
- Our systems infrastructure, facilities and workforce have to accommodate the most complex surgical procedures imaginable in a tertiary hospital, alongside the high-touch, low-tech primary care provided in a community clinic, and allow us to excel at both.
While the diversity of our missions and activities can be a source of resilience, this diversity can also put us at odds with one another as well as with external players. Within UMMC, there are tensions at times between the components of "who we are" noted above. Often those tensions center on the need to allocate limited resources - typically money, but other resources as well. There's also the inevitable friction between the subcultures that populate our world - doctors, nurses, therapists, researchers, educators, clinicians, administrators, blue collar, white collar…to name a few.
Reconciling these diverse interests is a big job. It's my job, principally, but it falls to everybody to understand our complex makeup and to recognize that for UMMC to be successful, everybody has to give a little and to look for and honor the common ground of our shared purpose.
The payoff is that our future will be all the brighter. Guided by our strategic plan, we are in the process of transforming our core mission areas to engender more team-based learning, more clinical and population-based research, and higher quality care delivered more efficiently.
Our plan also recognizes that as effective and influential as we may be, we cannot hope to move Mississippi's health status off the bottom nationally by acting alone. We will have to work with other organizations, both public and private, to have significant positive statewide impact.
Inevitably, there will be distractions and disruptions along the way. But we must stay true to who we are - as complicated and confounding as that can sometimes be - on our path to A Healthier Mississippi.