News & Commentary

11.22.10

Welcome from George E. Thibault, MD

Just as academic medicine is undergoing a dramatic transformation in how it teaches health professions students, we at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation – the only national foundation solely dedicated to improving health professions education – have undergone our own makeover to improve how we educate you about our work. Today we’re very excited to debut a brand new look for our organization.

Our new website will better inform you about the fast-moving developments in health care and health professions education at a pivotal time in the United States. And, it will offer a much more nimble and effective platform to tell our story and engage you in our work.

Our goal for this new website is to make it easier for you to navigate in your search for information, and for us to:

• Share lessons grantees have learned, highlight best practices, and show the link between their work, the Foundation’s priorities, and health policy;
• Relay timely news about our grantees, the Foundation, and other relevant work in the field of health professions education;
• Stimulate conversations between and among grantees to promote collaboration;
• Illustrate the work we fund; and
• Explain our rich history, mission, and evolving priorities for improving health professions education over the past 80 years.

Most importantly, we don’t want this website to be just a one-way communications channel.  We now have a flexible communications platform designed both to inform and stimulate conversations among grantees and other leaders in the field.  Through these conversations we hope to facilitate long-term collaboration so that we can work together to improve health professions education nationwide.

This new website will be a place to learn about the Foundation’s areas of focus, such as what schools are doing to foster interprofessional education and teamwork learning; teach principles of patient safety, quality improvement and system performance; develop new models for clinical education that encourage community-based learning; increase the diversity of health professionals; and improve education for the care of underserved populations.

But it also will be a place for me and others to express our views and learn about what’s going on in the field.  In this News & Commentary section, you will find regular posts from me offering my perspective on a range of issues from health policy, to health politics, to philanthropic collaboration. It will also be a place where Macy grantees and champions will offer their views on key topics; where you will read updates about the Foundation’s work, programs and research; and where you will see commentaries on relevant issues in the news such as the Affordable Care Act, how advances in health professions training will improve care, or why changes in graduate medical education are needed.

They say that with age comes wisdom.  As the Macy Foundation celebrates its 80th birthday, we’re glad to use this milestone to showcase a new and improved look that will help us continue to be a valuable resource and change agent in the field of health professions education. 

I welcome your thoughts in the comments below.