School of Medicine
Executive Summary
Decades of hard work by dedicated physicians and scientists, along with capable and often inspired leadership, have placed the Duke School of Medicine among the nation's best. Now, on the 75 th anniversary of our beginnings, we are faced with choices that will define our course for at least the next 10 years. Our shared vision is that we place equal value on high achievement in five fundamental categories of activity – inquiry, discovery, translation, adoption and service – each of which cuts across our core missions of education, research and patient care. Each specific element of our plan has an underlying premise grounded in an assessment of current strengths and emerging opportunities. This plan has been crafted from the contributions of hundreds of individuals working for almost a year, and has been refined during two months of intensive conversations that have involved a large proportion of the Medical School community. It blends the vision of senior leaders with ideas and aspirations arising from faculty, students and staff, and has been designed with flexibility to accommodate the unexpected.
Because women and men of Duke should have bold (yes, "outrageous") ambitions, we should be satisfied with nothing less than a leading role among the world's best academic medical centers. Our Strategic Plan should ensure that members of our faculty will gain international distinction, and that our students – MD, PhD and Masters degree candidates, as well as post-graduate residents and fellows - should be selected and prepared for leadership in a rich diversity of career pathways. To do this, our plan emphasizes first and foremost the People of the School of Medicine, focusing resources in new ways to attract and retain the finest faculty and learners. The second major dimension of our Strategic Plan calls a carefully selected number of new thematic initiatives (Programs) designed to seize current opportunities for Duke to lead, and a structured program of reinvestment in our existing departments, institutes and centers. Other provisions are made also to provide the best possible physical environment (Places) in which our faculty, staff and students will work and communicate.
People:
- Because we have a unique curriculum and philosophy of medical education, Duke should be the place where self-directed learning reaches its pinnacle. We will accomplish this by curricular innovations using the most advanced educational technologies and adult learning techniques, by investment in new scholarships to expand our MD/PhD program and to empower MD candidates into leadership paths, by new measures to attract the best PhD candidates, by new degree-granting programs in global health, computational medicine, and molecular medicine, and by new measures to facilitate career development of faculty focused primarily on education. We also will seek creative ways by which the School of Medicine can enrich the quality of the undergraduate experience at Duke.