In 1958, the College of Kentucky Board was wrestling with an audacious and impressive subject – find out how to develop a medical middle that may serve our state.
There was fierce opposition in some quarters. There was, after all, the not inconsiderable activity of funding it. And there was the query of what a medical middle would actually be.
In a report ready for the Board, the needs of the medical middle have been outlined in plain, easy and direct language …. “To coach extra medical doctors and well being personnel to serve Kentucky … to facilitate analysis … to supply medical care to the indigent … to supply a base for a Medical Heart which can serve your complete state.”
The middle, the report continued, “can be oriented towards the particular and distinctive issues of Kentucky” and can home “an built-in array of services” that may have “affiliations with hospitals” as a part of a mission to “obtain the very best high quality of program …”
That was 1958. It might have been written in 2023 – not as a lament about what hasn’t been completed and what stays to be completed, however as a testomony to an everlasting and compelling imaginative and prescient so highly effective that it continues to gas our ambitions and drive our desires even at present.
Chair Brockman outlined a number of factors of progress our well being care system has made within the final 15 years – from rankings and measures of high quality to tangible outcomes of treating and therapeutic extra sufferers in each nook of our Commonwealth.
Led by this board and sparked by the creativity and dedication of so many proficient individuals all through this enterprise, you’ve got constructed a nationally acknowledged educational well being system. And once we wanted them, our elected officers and policymakers stood with us.
We’re poised and positioned as by no means earlier than to do much more for the state we’re known as to advance by way of care and compassion.
And that, in essence, is what we’re right here to be taught extra about, and talk about extra deeply, this afternoon – how we convert the promise of continued progress into the remedy and, more and more, the prevention of extra illness and dying in our state.
The imaginative and prescient and mission are the identical as in 1958 – to be a beacon of hope and middle of therapeutic all through Kentucky. Greater than 15 years in the past, that imaginative and prescient was crystallized across the concept of guaranteeing that no Kentuckian must enterprise removed from residence to obtain the very best in superior subspecialty care.
We refreshed and re-examined our planning over time, however our focus has remained mounted.
We’re compelled by the wants of our state to proceed to construct and maintain our presence as Kentucky’s premier middle for superior care.
Nonetheless, we’re at an inflection level.
The panorama for well being care is present process dramatic change.
The monetary pressures for hospitals, massive and small, proceed to extend.
We face challenges in recruiting and retaining the very best workforce – the immensely proficient medical doctors, nurses, technicians and different help employees who make therapeutic potential.
Extra individuals – each inside the UK group and people who merely can’t entry the care we offer for a lot of causes – have main and ambulatory remedy wants that needs to be crammed nearer to residence.
We at the moment are a sprawling educational well being system inside a rising and thriving college enterprise – one thing these on whose shoulders we stand might by no means have envisioned greater than six a long time in the past.
Now we have constructed, not for the names on buildings or for acclaim, however for our state – its well being and its future. And we should proceed to develop to fulfill the rising wants of our state.
Doing so, although, would require a clear-eyed, pragmatic strategy to long-range budgeting and planning.
There’s a saying: no margin; no mission. It’s an oft used chorus as a result of it’s true. To make actual our desires for a more healthy state, we should make actual a sustainable funds that helps our mission.
Our imaginative and prescient and the way we’ll make it a actuality is the results of purposeful and collaborative planning, considerate technique and a continued dedication to dreaming about what is feasible for the well being of a individuals and a state we’re privileged to serve.
We face huge challenges in increasing our attain as an educational well being system that performs such an integral position in our establishment’s mission to advance Kentucky.
We even have unbelievable alternatives to do and be extra for Kentucky.