The Vision for Medicine at Michigan
Great scholarship, great scientific inquiry and great advances in clinical care build upon themselves in a climate where superior performance is aimed for, vigorously supported and repeatedly achieved.
The University of Michigan Medical School, the hospitals and clinics, and the many areas of basic science and clinical science within the Health System are among the very best in the nation. It is the intention of the U-M Health System leadership to not only maintain the standard of excellence that has given the institution the stature it enjoys today, but to become even better – to become one of the very top leaders in academic medicine in America.
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Robert Bartlett, M.D., Professor of Surgery, with the ECMO heart-lung support device he and his team created
Photo: Martin Vloet
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What does “even better” mean in the context of excellence?
When you consider the astounding pace of medical science today, with new discoveries in brand-new fields such as nanotechnology, genomics, preoteomics and bioinformatics, “even better” means moving quickly and smartly with research and clinical facilities that are up-to-the-minute.
On the wider University of Michigan campus, there are many old buildings, built early in the last century, that, with periodic renovations, have maintained their usefulness and beauty over many decades – Angell Hall, the Graduate Library, Burton Tower, the Rackham Building, the Art Museum.
This is not the case with medicine. A hospital building that is 30 years old is verging on hopeless obsolescence. Research and clinical equipment are updated and reinvented every few years. Therefore, the capital resources required to maintain a top-ranked medical research and teaching institution are quite extraordinary when compared with many other aspects of academe. That is why four main capital projects are part of the Health System’s Campaign for The Michigan Difference.
People, however, are always the heart of an institution, and recruiting and retaining the very best teachers, researchers, clinicians and students in the nation goes hand-in-hand with having outstanding facilities within which they can work. For this reason, greatly increased numbers of permanently endowed professorships, scholarships, fellowships, research funds and programs are also key components of the Health System’s Campaign for The Michigan Difference.