Measuring Our Impact

I am pleased to share with you the 2016 Dean’s Report, which went “live” today. It describes how, over the past year, we in the Faculty of Medicine have advanced our strategic priorities. We do this through big and bold projects, but also through smaller, incremental activities. Some of this has been driven by institutional leadership, some inspired by our partners and friends, while the rest has happened thanks to the initiative of our students, faculty and staff. What is consistent through it all is our commitment to providing leadership to improve health through education, research and partnerships.

Before I describe how we’re advancing our strategic priorities, it’s worth reminding you what they are. There are three:

• Prepare: Preparing the next generation of leaders in the health sciences.
• Discover: Leading research that answers questions of fundamental and societal relevance. Translating discoveries to improve health.
• Partner: An ideal and preferred partner. A gateway to and for the world.

We’ve based the report on these three key words: Prepare, Discover, Partner. It’s a succinct way to describe what we do and how we do it. 

So how have we advanced how we prepare our students for the challenges ahead? For starters, we have completely reimagined the first two years of our MD program. As you know, we have just launched the new Foundations Curriculum, which provides a greater emphasis on case-based learning and teamwork. There has been a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to make this possible, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Marcus Law, the Director of Foundations in the MD Program, and his colleagues Drs. Martin Schreiber, Pier Bryden, Jay Rosenfield and Patricia Houston – and the administrative staff who has supported the program’s roll-out.

We’re continuing to prepare leaders in the rehabilitation sector, as our profile of recent graduates in the report will attest. And, through the Ontario Internationally Educated Physical Therapy Bridging program, we are delivering the training and experience foreign-trained physical therapists require to reach their professional goals. Students who complete the program have an 86.6% pass rate on their qualifying exam and 100% of those who pass are employed.

We’re also introducing new graduate programs, including the launch of Canada’s first Master’s program in clinical pharmacology. This program, which is geared towards students who don’t wish to pursue a career in academia, delivers valuable hands-on lab skills alongside a range of elective courses that allows each student to tailor his or her degree.

To better support discovery in our Faculty, we have put an emphasis on expanding and improving our facilities. By acquiring new space at MaRS and securing funds to improve existing labs, we are trying to ensure we have the world-class facilities that befit the world-class research conducted at U of T. And if we have doubt that our work is world-class, we need only look at our research statistics to see the impact we are having on discovery around the globe. When you look at the number of articles published in top journals in 2015, we are third in the world – ahead of Stanford and Johns Hopkins. The examples of outstanding research abound within our Faculty – be it Graham Collingridge, whose work on long-term potentiation earned the Brain Prize (considered the “Nobel Prize for neuroscientists”), or Jill Cameron and Margaret Herridge, who are leading a national multi-phase project, involving ten intensive care units across Canada to identify risk factors for patients and families with the goal of designing rehabilitation models to improve outcomes.

Our ability to make these achievements is largely thanks to our commitment to partnerships. We both benefit and contribute through our partnerships, whether its through our engagement within U of T, our collaboration with our affiliated hospital, our engagement with other universities or industry, or our work with government. This has led to initiatives like the Neuroscience Catalyst, which brings together industry and academia to support early stage research in mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) Network in Diabetes and Related Complications, which is aiming to transform the health outcomes of individuals with diabetes and its related complications. As our Vice Dean of Partnerships Dr. Lynn Wilson will tell you, partnerships help us deliver on our mission of improving health outcomes.

For all of the great work highlighted in this year’s report, there are so many more examples we could mention. Our success is made possible by each and every member of this Faculty – our students, alumni and friends, administrative staff, researchers, instructors and professors. You have all contributed to making us the global powerhouse we are today. I want to thank you all for your efforts in the past year. So let’s recommit as we begin a new academic year to making our impact even greater! 

I welcome your feedback. You can Tweet your comments to @UofTMedDean.

Trevor Young
Dean, Faculty of Medicine
Vice-Provost, Relations with Health Care Institutions