Mission

We seek to advance the power of medicine by providing a stimulating, supportive climate where faculty, scientists, trainees and support staff strive for excellence and collaborate freely to achieve shared goals. In order to accomplish this, we focus on five major principles:

• Save the patient.
• Do the right thing.
• Be the bridge.
• Ask questions, seek answers.
• Those who laugh, last.

Ultimately, we all work in medicine, whether through patient care, education, or research to help save our patients. It is, at once, both our calling and our greatest challenge.

In caring for our patients and in pursuing research and teaching, we must act in a way that conveys our spirit of cooperation and our dedication to reason. We must do the right thing to serve as an example to our colleagues around us and especially to our patients and to our learners.

Separating ourselves from our colleagues who have dedicated themselves to patient care only, in an academic medical center we must constantly be striving to seek answers to questions that are yet unanswered. Our curiosity helps define this difference and it is our quest to respond to this curiosity that makes academic medicine our career.

In our department, we emphasize that we are here to build bridges and not silos. Our spirit of collegiality and collaboration as opposed to confrontation is critical to our success. By building bridges to the various research sciences and institutes in our university and in our community, we make ourselves stronger.

Finally, as is emphasized to the residents and our other learners almost every day, you have to love what you do and you have to do what you love. If you do those things, then it makes your job more than a job. Our department works hard, and we are proud of our people and our accomplishments. And while we work hard, we also have fun. It is this spirit that helps build a positive environment in which we define success not only in what we accomplish individually but how far we go as a team.