Dr. Kevin Black, vice dean of Penn State College of Medicine’s University Park Regional Medical Campus and the C. McCollister Evarts Chair and Professor in the Department of Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation, was named the interim dean of the College of Medicine, effective July 1, 2019.
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The excitement of the role lies in the challenge. The value or the gratification lies in the ability to serve others. There aren't many professions where you can make a difference in somebody's life every single day. I love taking care of patients.
But I feel like my career would be lacking if I was only taking care of patients. I love working with medical students, and residents, and learners in general. And I love being able to advance the field through scholarly work.
Some people, I think, think that the health system is simply here to fund the College of Medicine. And really, nothing can be further from the truth. We are here not just to take care of patients, but to provide better care for patients in five years than we are providing now, and in 15 years, better care than in five years. That does not happen unless we are working with the college to advance the field, and unless we are training the next generation of health care providers to provide care that is better than the care that we provide today. They need to be inspired to look ahead and look for challenges in health care and say, I'm going to solve that problem.
I think we will have to learn to work together with the separation of Penn State Health from the College of Medicine. And while that is a separation on paper, we continue to be one organization. The opportunity for us is to show how a college of medicine and a health system can work together in maximizing our opportunity to provide outstanding patient care, train the next generation of health care learners, and advance research.
Health systems all over the country are changing. We don't always know in advance if those changes are going to work out. But we have a group of people here that share very common values, that are committed to each of the missions, and we will work together to assure that we continue to achieve excellence in everything that we do.
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