Dean's Update
June 28, 2024 - Aron Sousa, MD
Above: Aron at the Board of Trustees retreat.
Friends,
This week, we welcomed the Michigan State University Board of Trustees, the president, and university leadership to Flint and our Flint Campus building. As you might expect for a campus dedicated to faculty and student community engagement, the highlights of the day were all about the students, community, and faculty.
For those of you who do not know the history of our work in Flint, indulge me a smidge or a paragraph. MSU has been in Flint for a century, and the college has educated clinical students in Flint since the early 1970s. During the Michigan tidal wave of medical school expansion in the late noughties and early teens of this century, leaders in Flint considered expanding to a complete medical school in Flint. In the end, it turned out that expanding our clinical class in Flint, centering the MPH program in Flint, and creating a public health research unit in Flint was a more practical endeavor.
Thursday morning, I had the chance to introduce our team and their work to the president and the board. I started with this framework: our successes in Flint are due to the intelligence, expertise, talent and hard work of the people of Flint, who are our colleagues, collaborators, and compatriots. And, this is not hyperbole. Our community partners are co-PIs on center grants and R01’s, co-chaired the search for our founding chair, and sit on our search committees. The people of Flint are our superpower and our unfair competitive advantage.
And that was what the board saw this week. Our public health department is the only unit we can find that integrates of community participatory approach throughout the decisions, activity, and history of the department. This is what we imagined from the beginning, but it is more successful than we ever dared hope. Our Flint clinical campus, with its two certificates, remains highly sought after by our students, and the MPH is now accredited by CEPH and has graduated more than 700 public health professionals. The research unit developed into the Charles Stewart Mott Department of Public Health. You know about their work during the Flint water crisis, their remarkable grants, and national innovations like the fruit and vegetable prescription program and Rx Kids. You can catch up on the work with our Flint colleagues and collaborators in this MSU Today Collection.
During the Thursday breakfast session, to which students were invited, a small group of our students came in to ask the university to support students from the Middle East and North Africa, to divest from companies supporting the incursion in Gaza, and that we find a way to help medical students from Gaza continue their education. They were polite, impassioned advocates who spoke up, and then they left us to the rest of our work.
As the students said to us, the situation for civilians and health care workers in Gaza is deadly, and I am sure all in that room want to help those in need in Gaza and elsewhere. As health care providers, we feel a special kinship for physicians, nurses, and all who provide for the sick and injured in war torn areas like Gaza. Our professions confront this need and danger in too many places around the world. The university is working to provide support for students with families and loved ones in harm’s way. It feels paltry to again link to our resources, yet they are useful and available to students, faculty, and staff. Some of these issues are beyond the scope of a college, but I am in contact with one of our national organizations about what might be done to help medical students from Gaza, which has been an area of discussions among deans.
The board retreat and visit were a remarkable success, and I must thank everyone who put so much work into the sessions we held for the board. There are too many people to list here across staff, students, and faculty. The talent and teamwork across our Flint units, the dean’s office, and the operations, security, communications, and facilities teams were excellent and noticed. Thank you so very much!
Early Thursday morning, the state budget passed. I have not sorted through all its implications for the university, but there is good support for four specific college programs:
- The Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program, which provides $15 prescriptions for fresh produce to pediatric and prenatal patients in Flint, received $500k in support of the work of the program and the team of Dr. Amy Saxe-Custack in the Pediatric Public Health Initiative (PPHI).
- The MICARES program, which helps train students, nurses, and physicians in the care of addiction got its first line-item support in the budget. Dr. Cara Poland and her team will use the $1.5M to expand services and education in Michigan.
- The MIDOCS program is a collaboration of several medical schools to support residency training in underserved communities. We use the residency slots to train psychiatrists in and for rural communities using MSU and Pine Rest as base programs with rural training sites in Marquette and Traverse City. We also have rural family medicine residents based in Midland who finish their training in Alpena. The state has increased MIDOCS from 24 residency slots to 32, which is more than expected. My thanks to Mark Brieve and Jerry Kooiman for their advocacy for this important program, which has already increased the number of psychiatrists in the UP by 30%.
- And, Rx Kids, the PPHI anti-poverty program addressing the first year of a child’s life, was awarded $20M in matching funding for the next expansion of Rx Kids to new communities in the state. As you all know, Mona Hanna, MD (’02) is the director and founder of Rx Kids.
Across the college our people advocate for programs and changes in the hope of making the world a better, healthier place. So be it
Serving the people with you,
Aron
Aron Sousa, MD, FACP
Dean, Michigan State University College of Human Medicine