Situation:
The Department of Medicine, comprising of 18 divisions and more than 1,300 faculty members, is the largest department within the Faculty of Medicine. With new leadership, and following a period of tremendous fatigue and isolation due to COVID, the Department of Medicine was committed to embarking on a strategic planning process with the aims to set a unified direction, strengthen membership engagement and connections across the distributed sites spanning the Province, and to enhance integration both within and beyond UBC in order to support an effective learning health system.
Our Actions:
- Constitution of a broad and diverse governance structure to support the development and validation of the strategic plan, inclusive of membership from across sites and divisions
- Robust member engagement with clinicians, faculty and learners consisting of multiple townhalls at hospital sites across the province to understand their unique and common challenges and priorities, and to validate the developing strategic framework including vision, mission, values and priority areas, along the way
- Engagement with UBC internal and external stakeholders, including patient representatives, throughout the process to identify opportunities for integration and ways to strengthen the emerging learning health system
- Advisory support on communications and website updates to facilitate engagement throughout the process
- Synthesis of outcomes from all engagement sessions into a set of key insights and priority areas of focus
- Alignment with the Faculty of Medicine’s Strategic Plan and Evaluation Framework to support integration and reinforcement of Faculty priorities and metrics, while maintaining departmental uniqueness where appropriate
- Facilitation of multiple working group and advisory group sessions to co-develop and validate the strategic framework, goals, actions, metrics and articulation of the strategic narrative
- Advisory support with implementation of the plan to ensure success
Results:
- A clearly articulated, broadly informed, focused set of actionable and measurable priorities reflective of the Department’s domain appropriate province-wide health care challenges and opportunities that will direct the Department’s decisions and resource allocations over the coming five years
- An engaged and connected network of department members across the province, aligned in purpose and supported by specific strategic goals targeted at enhancing and sustaining a culture of collaboration, communication, and integration as a department and as a partner within the Provincial health system