UCSF Chancellor Breathes Life into Priorities with Launch of Website
Today UCSF is launching a website (www.ucsf.edu/chancellor) focusing on the priorities and plans of Chancellor Sue Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, who will use the site to regularly communicate to and get feedback from the UCSF community.
The website is organized around the chancellor’s top five priorities – Patients and Health, Discovery, Education, People and Business – which she outlined soon after she took the helm of UCSF in August 2009.
“My job is to breathe life into those priorities, to make them more than just words, to connect the dots and to show how they relate to one another,” Desmond-Hellmann wrote in her introductory message on the website. “My job is also to inspire people to attain goals attached to those priorities in ways that are innovative and of global importance. It’s also the role of the chancellor to provide coherence for what we’re doing, along with a roadmap for where we’re going.”
One of her goals in starting this website is to delve a little more into the five priorities, and show them at work, she said. “Through the site, I hope to give you a sense of not only what I think matters – and believe me, you’ll hear plenty about that – but what everyone else at UCSF cares about too.”
The chancellor’s website also includes her messages to the campus community, media and UCSF coverage of her leadership, notices about upcoming appearances and video and text of her speeches, among other features.
The website tells the stories that showcase each of the chancellor’s five priority areas. Among the highlights are:
- A preview of the Teaching and Learning Center, now under construction, where UCSF students can hone clinical skills, receive training in telemedicine and engage in valuable interprofessional collaborations.
- A phase II clinical trial to treat glioblastoma multiforme, a terminal, aggressive brain cancer, by using a vaccine made from a patient’s own tumor to elicit an immune response from the body that attacks the tumor while leaving other cells unharmed.
- A look at the work of the Integrated Nurse Leadership Program, run by UCSF’s Center for the Health Professions, which has helped increase medication administration accuracy to 98 percent in 2009 at participating hospitals – up from 84 percent in 2006.
- A recap of the UCSF Leadership Development Program, which has trained about 185 senior and mid-level managers and provided useful lessons, such as how to help staff feel positive, even during difficult times; how to foster optimal work performance; and how to run more effective meetings.
- A look at how UCSF Mission Bay is serving as a catalyst to the growing biotechnology industry in San Francisco through efforts including the Mission Bay Incubator Network, which now currently has 19 startups, with another five in the QB3 Garage at UCSF.
As the chancellor points out, the website will tell how UCSF is achieving its mission.
“As a community and as individuals, we strive to make a difference by cultivating good health and well-being in the United States and beyond,” Desmond-Hellmann said. “And in making differences both small and profound, we’re changing the world for the better.”