It is the week of Thanksgiving, and our newsletter highlights a variety of great accomplishments by our faculty, trainees, and staff that are just some of the many reasons that I am grateful to be a part of the UNMC Internal Medicine department. We lift up faculty who will be retiring at the end of December and taking on new roles as Emeritus faculty—Dr. Michael Sorrell, Dr. Renee Young, and Dr. Joe Sisson. I cannot begin to capture what each of these individuals has done for the department over the years. Dr. Sorrell is a former Chair who truly re-created this department as an academic department and recruited so many faculty leaders to UNMC. Dr. Young with her passion for caring for inflammatory bowel disease patients has been essential to getting the Paustian Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center off the ground. Dr. Sisson has been a transformative presence for the Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep division (and helped birth the Allergy division). Capturing a phrase from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night… “thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks” to each of these faculty.
The newsletter highlights faculty with new roles. I appreciate Dr. Jennifer Parker taking on the Acting Division Chief of the General Internal Medicine while we proceed with a national search for a new Chief. We have candidates for that position visiting campus in early January and February. Dr. Sarah Richards who has led Nebraska Medicine’s provider and patient experience team will now focus on provider experience. Dr. Leslie Eiland and Dr. Jennifer Colella will take the leadership of patient experience with Dr. Eiland focused on ambulatory patients (and a role with telehealth) and Dr. Colella will focus on inpatient experience. As we noted in the recent annual department update, we have many faculty in leadership roles within Nebraska Medicine and they are great contacts when you have an idea about how to change something or a concern about an issue. If you couldn’t attend the zoom faculty meeting, you should have received the slides via email and there is also a recording of faculty meetings. If you have any questions about material covered, please reach out to me. We have several short presentations for our December department meeting on December 16th at 5pm by zoom. In January, I would like the agenda to be focused on questions or topics that you all identify, so please send your thoughts to me (dromberg@unmc.edu).
Please look at all the updates in the newsletter—new grants and contracts, a great showing at the American College of Rheumatology by our Rheumatology division, special recognitions, notes on life events, DEI updates, and a remembrance of Shaun Capurro, a longtime employee in the Hematology/Oncology division who passed away recently and will be missed very much.
In November and December, the Nebraska Medicine/UNMC COM culture conversation is focused on the iTEACH value of excellence. One of the tools for keeping excellence in our conversations is to identify your “blue chips”—those things that are most important to you, both at work and at home- and then making sure the plans we are developing address those blue chips. Let’s keep challenging one another to know our blue chips and communicate them to one another as we work as teams.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving and begin a season of holidays, I hope each of you has some moments of rest and relaxation and time for those things that bring you joy. I give thanks for each of you and all you do.