Dean Nancy Andrews outlined a future for the School of Medicine this week that’s based on attracting and retaining the highest quality faculty and creating a supportive, innovation-driven environment for faculty, students and staff.
In her annual State of the School address Tuesday in the Semans Center for Health Education, Andrews said the school’s new strategic plan is in line with Duke Health’s strategic plan released in January. It calls for supporting the school’s strengths and allowing for growth in areas of key emerging fields.
“We want to be known for a portfolio that runs from the basic sciences to population health,” Andrews said. “We are an institution that comes up with ideas, makes discoveries, invents what’s needed to translate those discoveries, innovates on these and other people’s inventions, works to find solutions for implementation and is entrepreneurial in getting this work out there for the public good.”
Andrews described the plan as “ambitious” but “not comprehensive.”
“We need it to be flexible,” she said. “It is a living document. Things change, and if we need to move into areas not mentioned in the document, we will.”
The goals of the strategic plan are similar to the themes of the school’s last plan in 2006. The main themes include developing and supporting the quality of faculty and staff, improving research opportunities, developing needed lab and office space, extending collaborations and harnessing school resources wisely.
One goal is to recruit, nurture and retain exceptional faculty who develop new ideas, promote collaboration and become magnets for other leading researchers and caregivers, Andrews said.
A commitment to diversity and inclusion “in everything we do” is an essential part of this effort, Andrews said. She listed a number of ongoing initiatives in this field, including a school-wide conversation on race and medicine and collaborative efforts to support underrepresented minorities.
Andrews highlighted the new Center for Population Health, the school’s first venture into the non-clinical social sciences.
The center, she said, will be a launching pad for a new department of population health. Its vision will be to develop collaborations across the university to research and develop solutions on complex questions about the drivers of health in populations.
Collaborations of these kind have long been part of the school’s success, Andrews said, and she encouraged faculty to seek further collaborations within the school, in other units across the university, with Duke’s global campuses in Singapore and Kunshan and in partnerships with industry, Andrews said.
“We mean collaboration in pretty much every sense,” she said. “We do a pretty good job of this already, and I think we all benefit from it.”
The plan also calls new laboratory space on campus but also an expansion of the school’s presence in the downtown Durham Innovation District, something that Andrews said will benefit the city while giving the school space “to do things we don’t have space for here on campus.”
“We want to be part of the Durham Innovation District,” she said.
The strategic plan is expensive, and Andrews said it will need to be funded through additional philanthropy and wise use of resources. She said the school has already raised more than $1 billion under Duke Forward, surpassing its goal of $970 million.
Andrews praised Duke as a place that knows how to get things done.
“I think everyone knows the last eight years in academic medicine have been difficult financially. I’m amazed at how much you have accomplished, how good you are in doing things with little money,” she said to a room full of faculty, staff and students.