From Aron’s Desk

The executive VP’s provided excellent advice and flanking skills in the rescue of this frightened young bird.  You can argue that we should not have released a European invasive species onto our prairie, but how else can you really celebrate a sesquipedalian holiday like the semiquincentennial. Play Free Bird!

Friends, 

You can read about a place and talk to people about programs, but there is no substitution for visiting people and places. This week, I visited Edward Hospital in Naperville, Elmhurst Hospital in Elmhurst and Stroger Hospital of Cook County, still universally remembered as the legendary Cook County Hospital. I relish the chance to meet our faculty and students at our clinical sites: about half of our educational work takes place in the clinical settings of our partners and sometimes it is too easy to focus on what happens at our “main campus.”

Our community partnerships, especially our relationships with our clinical partners, are the lifeblood of RFU. Our faculty and staff in these settings provide the clinical experiences for our students, and our program partners are essential to the positive impact of our work. It can be difficult for a large university to see this, but Rosalind Franklin University and our colleges feel this importance acutely. I believe our community work will be core to our growth and our chances to expand the scope and scale of the improvements we foster in communities, our disciplines, and the world.

Edward Hospital and Elmhurst are about 30 minutes from each other in the southern district of Endeavor Health’s system. They are highly collaborative, and we had really good meetings with their leadership. Many of the medical staff see patients in both hospitals, and the clinical services reinforce each other. For those of you who recall the update from a couple of weeks ago, our new board chair, Kim Darey, MD ‘04, is president of Elmhurst. She clearly recognises everything the community has done to make the hospital special and gives so much back to that community.

One of the first questions I get when I meet with CMS alumni is “do students still go to Cook County?” And, yes they do. While the hospital building itself is relatively new, the mission and focus of the place is as it has always been. RFU has a 114 year collaboration with Cook County dating to the founding of the Chicago Medical School. That partnership continues and gets stronger. We had good meetings with the hospital leadership, a great turn out from a dedicated faculty, and I really enjoyed talking with about 20 of our third-year students who are currently on rotations there. 

The faculty and leadership of Stroger clearly value our students and that our students frequently do their residencies with them. They specifically talked about how dedicated our students are to the populations the hospital serves. I believe our students bring something special to Cook County after their time on our campus. A very large percentage of our students donate time to our student-led Interprofessional Community Clinic, which provides free care to our neighbors in Lake County and is one of the best student-run clinics in the country. That kind of effort and experience in support of our neighbors who struggle makes RFU students fit in so well at a venerable public hospital like Cook County, I mean Stroger.

Improving the wellness of all people with you, 

Aron

Aron Sousa, MD

President