The 186 students honored at the White Coat Ceremony have been working toward this goal for years, and the ceremony allows us to honor their hard work thus far and recognize the start of their journey to becoming physicians.
In his keynote address, Dr. Hussein Abdullatif spoke about one of the most important aspects of being a physician: the need for caring, compassion and empathy. Our outstanding faculty at the School of Medicine will spend the next four years making sure our students are competent, but it’s important we’ve already laid the foundation of their having a compassionate approach to caring for their patients.
I sincerely hope all the medical students at UAB will have a productive, enriching year in furthering their medical education.
It’s an exciting time to be a part of the School of Medicine. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the School of Medicine received a great result from the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, granting us eight years of accreditation. Full accreditation is a source of great pride; there are other outstanding medical schools in the southeast on probation. We were given two citations directing us to areas of improvement: audio updates for a lecture hall and needs to increase “active or self-directed learning” while decreasing the number of hours students spend in lectures.
We also still have to grow in diversity. We’ve made improvements, as noted by the LCME visitors, in hiring and retaining more female faculty, but there’s room for continued growth in these areas.
Academic Enrichment Fund
I also want to share with you a new and exciting step the school leadership has taken in growing and restoring research and academic programs at UAB. We have formalized for the first time a strategic and directed commitment from the clinical enterprise of UAB Medicine to create the Academic Enrichment Fund (AEF), which will support academic programmatic growth in the School of Medicine.The Academic Enrichment Fund will enhance our research mission, particularly in growing areas of informatics, genomics and personalized medicine. Support will also focus on a core group of AMC 21 initiatives: basic science growth, clinical trials and the recruitment of funded investigators.
As a leading academic medical center, our reputation is largely based on our research, academic and clinical programs, and patient care. I believe the AEF is a critical step in our responsibility as an institution to establish growth in new scientific areas and renew our investment in basic sciences.
I’ll communicate with you in the upcoming weeks and months more about the AEF, specifying how the mechanisms of the fund will work and how administrators and researchers can access support through the fund.