One Year’s Work, in Thirty Pages

Good morning!

Here is the understatement of the year: “There’s a lot going on at UMMC.”

Those who work here well know that we are a 24-7, 365 days-a-year operation, and there is rarely a dull moment.  Our activities encompass classrooms, research labs, patient care spaces, operating rooms, offices, libraries, cafeterias, mechanical shops and something like 20,000 souls who come and go from campus and other UMMC locations each and every day. 

Yes, there’s a lot going on.  And so to memorialize all this activity and track our progress toward our goals, I recently asked our Communications and Marketing team to begin producing annual reports for UMMC.

We have not customarily produced a formal annual report for the overall Medical Center, outside of financial and other data we provide to the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning.  A number of UMMC units produce annual reports that vary in content, depending on their purposes.

But the simple fact is, our faculty and staff are doing so much excellent work in support of our overall goal of achieving a healthier Mississippi, I thought it would be useful to document some of that information in a more systematic way. 

You can see this first annual report as an online PDF on the UMMC website. We also have a limited supply of printed copies for use in recruitment and other purposes, available in the Office of Communications and Marketing on the first floor of the Learning Resource Center.

The report highlights one fiscal/academic year of UMMC activity from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019.  It’s organized around the three interconnected missions of an academic medical center – health professions education, research and innovation, and the care we provide to patients who come to us from throughout Mississippi.  We’ve added a few other categories – administration, campus growth, clinical quality and finances – to round out the information.  It is by no means an exhaustive report, and barely does justice to the thousands of ways UMMC helps Mississippians every single day. 

As we enter a new, five-year cycle for UMMC’s strategic plan, the report also highlights our progress toward our strategic goals.  Despite being busier than ever with the day-to-day responsibilities of teaching, conducting meaningful research and caring for patients, our faculty and staff made significant progress toward our strategic goals last year.

You’ll read about some of the big things that occurred, such as our joint venture with Merit Health Madison that is enhancing our capacity for surgical cases.  This was an accomplishment that was years in the making.  Or the opening of our 22-bed Clinical Research and Trials Unit in University Hospital, another milestone we’ve been working toward for some time.  The report also touches on improvements that were less consequential but long overdue – such as the effort to reorganize our committee structure and operational policies after years of growth and change. 

I hope you enjoy this first annual report.  I’m proud to share it with you and others outside the institution, but I’m even more proud of what it represents:  A year’s worth of your exceptional work that is leading us ever closer toward our goal of A Healthier Mississippi.