Dr. Joyner’s Blog: GME Strategic Planning

Jennifer Best, MD

Cindy Hamra JD, MA

Byron Joyner, MD, MPA

Exciting times are afoot within the GME Office!

Now to be fair, our team finds all the work we do exciting, but at this moment we are working to finalize our GME Strategic Plan for AY2024 to 2029. In this edition of the Blog, we would like to provide our community with an overview of work to date and what you might expect moving forward.

How Our Community Has Informed The Process

You may recall that in July 2022, we sent a survey to our community and stakeholders, including our residents and fellows, program directors and administrators, department administrators, chairs, and leaders of UW Medicine. Our goal here was to “broaden the circle” of voices, as compared with previous iterations of strategic planning. We appreciated hearing from many of you within the context of this SWOT (Strengths / Weaknesses / Opportunities / Threats) analysis about the work we accomplished related to our prior strategic plan and where there is work still to do.

How We Analyzed The Data

A group of GME team members sat with those results to identify themes for each group of stakeholders, with specific attention to themes identified by multiple groups as important priorities. Knowing that our work must be aligned with broader systems, the second step involved evaluated mapping this narrower list of themes against “inputs” that we felt would raise their priority moving forward, including UW Medicine strategy, our Equity Blueprint, ACGME requirements, and our own sense of emerging priority areas that has evolved as we engage each day with individuals, programs, and departments.

Emergent Priority Areas

Our previous strategic plan was predicated on list of key values that drove our work. Because we believe this has been an effective way to share our goals internally and externally, we will be communicating our new strategic plan on these same Strategic Values. At a high level, the following areas have emerged as key for AY24-29

ADVOCACY​

Does everyone in our community have what they need to do their jobs and feel valued? How do we help programs avoid accreditation threats? Can GME fund the work it wants to do?

COMMUNICATION​

Do members of the GME community feel connected with one another? Do we learn from one another and avoid reinventing the wheel?

EXPERTISE​

How do we create standards where they haven’t existed before? How do maximize our use of technology? How can we come to be seen as the standard for GME?

INTEGRATION​

How do we help programs to anticipate and respond to the shifts in clinical needs? How do we do more with limited resources? How do we support UW Medicine’s goals of serving the region?

PEOPLE​

How do we bring, grow, and keep the right people, doing the right work? How do we create an environment in which all members can reach full potential? How do we heal and care for our community?

QUALITY AND VALUE​

Can we be more strategic in data collection and reporting? How do we effectively “speak the language” of decision-makers when advocating for resources? How can we raise the visibility of learning environment needs that are common across programs and departments?

What’s Next?

We are vetting a draft of the Strategic Plan within the GME Office, including careful thought about how we will know we are making progress (What are our key performance indicators and outcomes?) We plan to bring a draft back to some members of the broader community that identified a desire to participate in a focus group with the plan to present the plan to the Graduate Medical Education Committed (GMEC) and share the final plan more broadly with our stakeholders – including you – in May and June.

This is important work – work that will take all of us. The worlds of clinical care, health professions education and GME are complex, and always shifting, as is the world around us. Thank you for the privilege of working on your behalf as your partners in this next season.