Could not complete log in. Possible causes and solutions are:
Cookies are not set, which might happen if you've never visited this website before.
Please open https://avalon.lib.virginia.edu/ in a new window, then come back and refresh this page.
An ad blocker is preventing successful login.
Please disable ad blockers for this site then refresh this page.
Many personal, social, organizational, and regulatory factors in health care today contribute to clinicians experiencing burnout, a chronic stress syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of inadequacy. When severe, these symptoms are often accompanied and exacerbated by depression—and sometimes lead to suicide. In this combined Medical Center Hour and Medical Grand Rounds, Dean Gianakos MD FACP will not teach techniques to fortify personal resilience in the face of incipient burnout or offer strategies to reduce the inefficiencies of practice. Rather, using poems and stories, he will open a dialogue on how health professionals can emotionally support one another, initiate crucial conversations, and reduce the isolation that too often characterizes medical practice.
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, UVA
In the spotlight for years now, health care that is truly equitable and patient-centered and delivered by a diverse, well-integrated team remains a goal—in most sites, it's not yet everyday reality. Individuals and institutions—including health professional schools as well as centers of clinical practice—continue to work toward this goal. But this effort cannot depend just on recruiting more diverse learners, reorganizing clinical environments, or deploying didactics aimed at eliminating biased attitudes and behaviors. Rather, it’s a matter of redesigning health professional education—curriculum, assessment strategies, learning environments—to prepare a thoroughly diverse workforce ready to counter health disparities. To actually realize diversity’s benefits, we must eschew a colorblind philosophy and embrace principles of equity pedagogy.
In this Medical Center Hour, Dr. Catherine Lucey explores equity pedagogy and how it may help to counter the structural racism and inequitable learning environments of traditional medical school. Such a fundamental change in our pedagogy may be necessary to improve health outcomes for patients of all cultures, colors, creeds, and means and, along the way, establish work environments where clinicians, teachers, and scientists of many backgrounds and professional preparations can all flourish.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture / Medical Education Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Office of Medical Education
Lucy Kalanithi is many things. Physician. Professor. Writer, and speaker. Mother. Widow. She was married for nine years to Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, the illness that claimed his life in 2015 at age thirty-seven. As he struggled, suffered, and worried, Paul wrote. His memoir—When Breath Becomes Air, for which Lucy wrote the epilogue—became a bestseller after it was published in 2016.
In this Medical Center Hour, which is also the School of Nursing's annual Bice Memorial Lecture, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi talks with UVA Nursing Professor Ken White about the Kalanithis' challenging journey to the end of Paul's life and how Paul and Lucy did not avoid suffering but, rather, leaned into it and created meaning from it.
The Zula Mae Baber Bice Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the School of Nursing
Neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2016) was a legend in his own time—as a physician but also as a writer whose work probed medicine, science, and the arts and as a tireless explorer of both the natural world and the human condition. His clinical tales, published in the medical literature and mass media alike, found a wide audience across medicine and society. Behind these tales, which stretched the case history to illuminate and celebrate the person who was marked, and often rendered remarkable, by neuropsychological illness, flared Sacks's own curiosity, an insatiable urge to question and a generous capacity for paying meticulous attention.
In this inaugural Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts, writer and photographer Bill Hayes, who was Sacks's late-life partner, offers insights into Oliver Sacks as a person and a physician whose creative nature and prodigious output enriched medicine and culture across a long and productive life. A writer and photographic artist in his own right, Hayes addresses the place of curiosity and creativity in Sacks's practice and his own, especially how, for both, interest in and radical openness to a fellow human being are paramount.
The Edward W. Hook Lecture in Medicine and the Arts / Medical Grand Rounds
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine, with which the Medical Center Hour shares a fund established by the late Edward W. Hook MD MACP whereby the arts can generously enrich medical education and training.
In recent years in the US, increasing workforce diversity has become a priority in health care and other industries. Many companies, including Fortune 500s, now recognize that having a diverse workforce improves both business and the bottom line—indeed, diversity is key to organizational excellence. In this Medical Center Hour, a panel of physicians explores whether UVA Health System's growing diversity can add value in a very different way: can our organization's greater diversity be a lever to mitigate bias in these increasingly fraught times?
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Tuberculosis continues to be one of the world's most deadly infectious diseases, killing almost two million people each year. In this Medical Center Hour, historian Christian McMillen explores TB's stubborn staying power by examining key aspects of the disease—including the rise of drug resistance and TB's resurgence with the HIV/AIDS epidemic—and detailing global efforts to control it since 1900.
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
This Richardson Memorial Lecture's origins are the hospital death of infant Lola Jayden Fitch and her family's journey to evoke change. The hour is anchored in the stories of Lola's parents--her mother, who questioned her intuition, and her father, who chose to continue working in the hospital where Lola's death occurred--and in a review of medical staff communication errors that tragically affected Lola's care.
How can we prevent communication breakdowns, improve teamwork, and foster greater transparency and true partnership with families to make health care better and safer, especially for the most vulnerable patients? How can Lola's Song and similar stories--those of patients, families, health professionals, and others--help us to accomplish this important work?
www.lolassong.com
The Jessie Stewart Richardson Memorial Lecture of the School of Medicine
Co-presented with the Office of Quality and Performance Improvement, UVA Health System
In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old English girl on a lark in Switzerland with a married man and her stepsister began writing a story that would outlive her by centuries. Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818, still fascinates and confounds us today, told and retold in so many genres that even those who have never read the original know the story. This Medical Center Hour marks Frankenstein's 200th anniversary by exploring two of the many reasons for its apparent immortality. First, this novel probes the central quest of medicine and biology: What is life? Second, it asks—but leaves for us to answer—the essential ethical question: Should we as human beings manipulate the spark of life?
Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
In June 2018, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a budget bill that gives 400,000 low-income Virginians access to government health insurance through Medicaid. This action marked an upbeat, bipartisan close to a bitter, four-year battle in the General Assembly. An Affordable Care Act option, Medicaid expansion makes additional low-income persons in participating states eligible for care that is funded chiefly with federal dollars. Virginia’s decision to join 32 other participating states hinged on a legislative compromise with Republicans that imposes work requirements on Medicaid recipients. While a few other states have taken similar positions, debate about work requirements continues in government, policy circles, and the courts. This Medical Center Hour looks at Medicaid expansion in Virginia—to be implemented in January 2019—from policy, political, and health care perspectives, with a focus on what it means locally, in Charlottesville and Central Virginia.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Thirty years ago, the medical school at East Carolina University created a readers' theater program in which short stories about medicine were adapted as theatrical scripts. Medical students performed a story by reading it aloud, then actors and audience--often a community group--together discussed the drama and the ethical and social issues it raised. These plays and post-performance discussions enlivened and changed how future physicians and audiences--prospective patients all--approached and learned from one another.
The best way to learn about medical readers' theater? Just do it. In this Medical Center Hour, UVA medical student actors present a dramatic reading of physician-poet William Carlos Williams's 1938 short story, "A Face of Stone." Following the performance, the audience joins in, as everyone responds to and discusses the play and the ethical, social, and cultural concerns it explores.
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Co-presented with the Sloane Society for Medical Humanities, UVA
