Budget woes and Worldchanging futures

Budget quandaries and quagmires

I’m a bit less prompt about posting early in the week. Put it down partly to the huge investment of time that I and others are devoting to managing budget cuts. The fact that we must plan for the worst, a little less bad and slightly less bad scenarios is incredibly time-consuming. As Chancellor Holden Thorp has written, these are very challenging times, and the impact of the Great Recession will leave UNC with many fewer resources for our core missions. We are not playing Monopoly. Our decisions have real impact for real people — people with names, faces, lives and families. No one here takes it lightly.

Last Friday, with no advance notice, we learned that one of our important service contracts will not be renewed, leaving us rental space we don’t need and cannot afford and people who no longer have a means of being paid. UNC provides critical services to the state across the system, and especially, across the professional schools. Across UNC-Chapel Hill, we care for patients with AIDS in prisons, educate teachers, provide telephone hotlines for vulnerable populations, train child care workers, offer continuing education in vital areas to our public health workforce, provide mental health services and a lot more (Read about some of our School’s service activities at NCIPH-North Carolina Institute for Public Health or Carolina Public Health magazine) . When our contracts are obliterated, we have no other way to meet North Carolinians’ needs. Yet, the legislature is in a real bind. There is not enough money to balance the budget unless revenue is increased. Follow continuing legislative deliberations at www.ncleg.net.

The future of academic medicine

I enjoyed speaking last week to the HORA (Health Organizational Research Association) meeting that Health Policy and Management hosted. It gave me a chance to read some key articles on academic medicine and to think about the important role our academic medical centers play in the health of populations. The original mission of these organizations was to improve the health of societies, a mission that is sometimes subsumed to other critical functions, such as discovery – important but only part of the mix. Public health and academic medicine should do even more together.

• Academic Health Centers: Leading Change in the 21^st Century (PDF)
• The Future of Academic Medicine Five Scenarios to 2025 (PDF)
• The Problem with Academic Medicine: Engineering Our Way into and out of the Mess (Abstract) (PDF download)
• A Single Mission for Academic Medicine: Improving Health (PDF)
• A Time for Transformative Leadership in Academic Health Sciences (PDF)

I have learned a lot from Paul Levy’s blog which my sister, Sara Rimer, the New York Times writer, showed me. He’s CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and talks about quandaries and developments in leading a hospital with a lot more as well. I was thrilled that he advocated to save the Boston Globe. I’m a shameless newspaperphile!

This is a book I’m going to buy and read

From TED Blog:

“The Worldchanging book, “A user’s guide to the 21st century“, is published today. Our friends at Worldchanging.com in Seattle have been for a few years now publishing an insightful and inspiring collective blog disseminating information about sustainability and social change and describing pragmatically what’s possible, what new technologies are coming along, what solutions to the world’s global and local most pressing problems people and organizations are putting in place.

“Alex Steffen writes in his editor’s introduction (Alex spoke at TEDGlobal last year). As we face a planetary crisis, ‘we also find ourselves in a moment of innovation unlike any that has come before… We live in an era when the number of people working to make the world better is exploding’.”

Is it true that the number of people working to make the world better is exploding? I really like that idea and hope it is true! What do you think?

Happy Monday! Barbara