Feature
Education is the Answer
Dr. Dorsey reflects on a decade as dean and provost
This autumn marks my 10th year as dean and provost of SIU School of Medicine. Together, we have accomplished a lot over the past decade. The medical school’s impact on the Springfield and surrounding communities is undeniable. As Springfield Mayor Mike Houston said last summer, “The medical school is the best thing to happen to Springfield since Abraham Lincoln.”
Having been at the medical school for nearly its entire 40-year-history, I’ve seen the evolution, much like the thousands of others who have worked to make the medical school and the clinics a success. We’ve built innovation upon innovation. A couple years ago, we added “service to the community” to our mission statement. It summarizes who we have been, who we are and who we always will be.
Academics are still our number one priority. Evidence of the School’s high educational value can be found in the LCME Accreditation report in 2007, which not only reaccredited the school for eight years but gave the medical school’s education programs a perfect score — a notable feat. It shows we take the educational process very seriously. But more than that, we perpetually try to innovate not for the sake of change, but for the sake of improvement. We’re not going to do what we’ve always done —we’re going to make it better.
According to a survey published in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2010, the School ranked #15 among all 140 medical and osteopathic schools in meeting the social mission of medicine: graduating primary care physicians, physicians who practice in medically underserved areas, and minority physicians. This autumn, SIU School of Medicine was one of just six medical schools chosen for a site visit by a committee formed as a result of the study. As noted in SIU’s recent economic impact study, the School of Medicine ranks in the top 20 percent nationally for graduates practicing in primary care and in the top 10 percent for graduates practicing in rural areas.
Our research efforts are another avenue of education. Without research, medicine can’t advance. Over the past decade, we’ve built an addition to the Springfield Combined Laboratory Facility and increased the number of researchers and grant funding. Our researchers have become world-renowned during their decades of work here, including making significant advances in aging, hearing loss and cancer.
In patient care, we’ve seen the growth of our subspecialties, which helps us serve the population and helps grow the city as a medical center. These patients don’t have to leave the community and disrupt their lives for long periods of time at great expense for sophisticated care clinics.
In 2005, we partnered with St. John’s Hospital and opened the St. John’s Children’s Hospital. The opening of the Simmons Cancer Institute with the Simmons donation — the largest gift in SIU’s history — has been one of the big highlights. These projects were under way prior to my appointment as dean, and I am honored to have worked with our partnering hospitals to support their development. They exemplify the critically important role the hospitals play in educating our medical students and residents and bringing tertiary services to the area.
It is such an exciting time for the future of SIU, as we broaden our focus while retaining our mission with a triple aim that is discussed nationally: better care for individuals, better health for populations and lower costs.
Like all academic medical centers, we can diagnose with greater precision and accuracy: MRIs, sophisticated tissue typing, blood testing, and genetic testing have become the norm in medical practices. But along with these tools, we need to always keep in mind the patient — who they are, what resources they have, and their unique situations. Understanding and attempting to improve the social determinants of health (poverty, education, having a home, a job) — are just as important as having the latest technology. Medical care is changing — the aging population will consume a significant part of the resources. We need to prepare our students for this changing world in which they will practice medicine.
I want our region to be the healthiest in the nation. We’re doing that. We’ve helped make Springfield a medical destination, finding a mutually beneficial partnership with the teaching hospitals. Through our ever-extending network of referring physicians, which include our many of our alumni, SIU School of Medicine has reached into the region to better the health care of citizens throughout our service area. Now I think we’re ready for the next step.
To that end, future endeavors include working with other educational institutions to address and focus on social determinants of health by altering policy and ensuring that the children of the region are well prepared for successful careers. That’s how we will make permanent improvements to the health of the region.
When I was teaching first-year students, whenever I would present them with a community health-related problem, it continually surprised me that they always reached the same conclusion: education is the answer.
That hasn’t changed over the past 40 years. That was the answer in 1970; it’s the answer today. We, as SIU School of Medicine, are the heart of medical education in the region. We’re only getting stronger, and so are the citizens we serve.