Campus Issues First Progress Report on Implementing Strategic Plan

By Lisa Cisneros

March 25, 2008

UCSF recently issued its first progress report on the implementation of the UCSF Strategic Plan, which outlines seven strategic directions for the University over the next decade.

The strategic plan articulates UCSF’s mission, advancing health worldwide™, its vision and these seven strategic directions:

• Fostering innovation and collaboration
• Translating discoveries into improved health
• Educating future leaders
• Providing highest-quality care
• Nurturing diversity
• Promoting a supportive work environment
• Serving our community

Overall, UCSF has made steady progress since completing the first-ever campuswide strategic plan in June 2007.

The entire progress report [PDF], lists 12 strategies identified for focused attention and progress this academic year, expected outcomes and key challenges ahead.

Among the challenges facing UCSF is the ability to invest new resources in academic programs and infrastructure improvements at a time when state and federal financial support is expected to decline in the upcoming fiscal year.

Despite the budget challenges facing UCSF, the UCSF Strategic Planning Board is determined to continue the campuswide momentum in implementing the strategic plan, according to UCSF Strategic Planning Board Co-chairs Peter Carroll, MD, and Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, Morris Herzstein Endowed Chair in Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

“The strategies in the plan are driving all major funding decisions — in terms of allocation and attention — this year,” says Carroll, an associate dean in the UCSF School of Medicine, chair of the Department of Urology and Ken and Donna Derr—Chevron Distinguished Professor in Prostate Cancer.

The strategies identified for focused attention this academic year cover a wide range of areas. Some strategies require major expenditures, customer service enhancements and cultural shifts, the last of which challenges the institution and individuals to break away from mindsets and methodologies of the past to achieve the desired goals.

Importantly, UCSF’s top leadership — Chancellor Mike Bishop, MD, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Eugene Washington, MD, the medical center CEO, and the deans and vice chancellors — is listed as the team or point persons responsible for implementing the 12 strategies.

The 12 strategies for focused attention this academic year are as follows:

• Provide Campus Core Research Facilities (CCRFs) offering advanced, innovative instrumentation and/or specialized services needed by a broad segment of the research community that are available to all at UCSF. See related story.
• Develop educational facilities and infrastructure commensurate with UCSF’s stature in health sciences education. See related story.
• Ensure that clinical services are operated with a patient-centered focus. See related story.
• Create a more diverse campus community. See related story.
• Improve the financial aspects of recruitment and retention to compensate for the high cost of living in the Bay Area.
• Provide administrative research services that are efficient, convenient and timely.
• Optimally deploy information technology for administrative, academic and clinical purposes. See related story.
• Rationalize the allocation of space over time to ensure alignment with the overall strategic properties and plans for UCSF across all mission areas of education, research, patient care and community service while maintaining sensitivity to individual program needs and previously established commitments.
• Establish a regular and transparent campuswide process for planning, budgeting and allocating resources, and develop new mechanisms to fund needed investments in infrastructure, including ongoing maintenance and operating costs.
• Develop UCSF Global Health Sciences (GHS) to integrate and focus UCSF’s expertise in biological, population, social/behavioral and clinical sciences, in collaboration with global partners, to eliminate major health disparities and reduce the burden of disease of the world’s most vulnerable populations. See related story.
• Ensure that San Francisco General Hospital continues to operate as a major UCSF research site.
• Develop and implement mechanisms by which senior leaders will be reviewed and held accountable.

Members of the UCSF Strategic Planning Board will be updating the campus community on the progress made in implementing the strategic plan at upcoming town hall meetings that will begin in April. Details will follow.

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