Dear Colleagues:
If we succeed at these new relationships, we all benefit. As individuals who depend on good health care for quality of life, we benefit. As employees of the university and citizens of Kansas we benefit from the harnessing of our region’s potential for an enriched medical and research environment.
Our academic medical center exists to educate and train health professionals and scientists who are committed to discovering cures for the diseases that afflict us and effectively delivering those cures to the people of Kansas and the region.
An academic medical center consists of two basic elements: a medical school and its primary hospital. The medical school is where the research and the teaching take place; further research and teaching by the medical faculty and the delivery of cures take place at the hospital. The quality of an academic medical center is determined by the quality of its medical school, its allied health and nursing schools, and its hospital and the extent to which all focus on discovery and delivery of cures.
Only in the last few years has the University of Kansas Hospital become financially and administratively sound. The creation of a KU Hospital Authority Board and restructuring of the hospital in 1998 put into place an administrative team that has carefully managed the hospital. The KU hospital has gone from a place with serious problems to a financially successful hospital with a proud record of superb care.
Unlike community and for-profit hospitals, an academic medical center hospital must re-invest its profits into the medical school and its faculty to promote the basic research and teaching that gives rise to the discovery of cures. Kansas state statute requires this re-investment. In every academic medical center there is a tension in striking the right balance between meeting the financial needs of the hospital and investing in the medical school. The best administrators and the best hospital boards understand this and find that right balance.
As important as the relationship is between a medical school and its primary hospital, the best academic medical centers must expose their students to many types of patients, procedures and styles of care in order to produce the very best physicians. This requires that a medical school affiliate with more than one hospital. A single hospital cannot sustain the requirements of a large and growing medical school.
We currently have multiple affiliates, including the two largest hospitals in Kansas -- Wichita’s Via Christi Regional Center and Wesley Medical Center. In Kansas City we have decided to affiliate with additional hospitals to train more doctors and better educate them. Broad affiliation also is essential for KUMC to achieve its goal of becoming a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center -- the gold standard for cancer care. Expanding our research effort to seek cures for cancer is KU’s No. 1 goal. We are far less likely to attain our cancer center goal without these affiliations.
The affiliation with these partners will ultimately make it possible for us to train an additional 100 doctors a year at an annual cost in excess of $10 million, which will be paid to KUMC entirely by these new hospital partners. As the state’s only medical school, we are eager to train 100 additional doctors every year. Since more than half of all practicing physicians in Kansas are graduates of our medical school or residency programs, we are confident that this affiliation will make more doctors available to serve Kansas communities.
Medical research and education are expensive and complicated. But the fundamental purpose of KUMC is simple: making the people of Kansas and the United States healthier. The superb doctors and researchers at KUMC, KUH, Saint Luke’s, Children’s Mercy Hospital, the Veterans Administration Hospitals in Kansas City, Leavenworth, Topeka and Wichita, as well as our medical faculty and partner hospitals in Wichita, Salina and Topeka are part of a vibrant network of talent focused on this fundamental purpose.
On behalf of these superb health care professionals, I pledge to you that we will remain dedicated and focused on discovery and delivery of cures to Kansans.
Sincerely,
Bob Hemenway
Chancellor
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