Interviewer: You re currently Chief of Surgery at the University and Medical Director of the
Orthopedic Service at MLKCH. How did your professional career evolve to such an important leadership position?
Dr. Washington: As I worked in various job situations, I was promoted into the position of leader or chairman or director in various practices. From that I actually moved on to become Vice Chairman and then Chairman of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Drew. I was lucky that as one hospital closed and an opportunity went away that, over time, a new one opened. I was given the opportunity to continue to be Chairman of Orthopedic Surgery and a Medical Director at the new hospital. Then, Dean Prothrow-Stith consolidated the departments to make the College of Medicine more efficient, and she re-appointed me with the added responsibility of leadership over the other subspecialties of surgery.
COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
Interviewer: What is the ideal outcome of your job?
Dr. Washington: The key here is focusing on medical care. If I can make medical care seamless throughout these institutions then we’ ll have accomplished something that I am looking to do, which is to provide excellent medical care for our patient populations while continuously educating ourselves. And I do it by coordinating with the University and educating my physicians through quality improvement meetings to make it an ongoing process.
Interviewer: How do you make this approach work?
Dr. Washington: I think we’ re doing much better than 5-10 years ago. The disparate groups are getting to understand what each group can contribute to the whole. And because of that, everyone is working more closely to get us back to a medical campus where not only do we treat patients, but we also teach students in a coordinated fashion with everyone moving through the institutions.
Interviewer: How does what you describe provide the opportunity to do good work here?
Dr. Washington: Coordination of activities in medical care is extremely important. The reality is that we want to be an area that can reproduce ourselves with the next generations of doctors so that they can take our places in the future. During the ten-plus years since the last hospital was closed, we did not produce people who would work in this area, per se. And now we have a significant deficit of medical providers, surgeons and doctors providing care in SPA 6.
Interviewer: You ve developed a model to address how to continuously and effectively treat
patients while developing excellent professional physicians. Do you think that succession planning in medicine could be a model for other professions?
Dr. Washington: Yes. When you have the ability to have your own institutions, run them, and produce people who will come along after you to run them, including people to treat populations, this is the best you can have. Other institutions are not going to supply talent, especially in underserved areas or where resources are deficient. You have the ability to create your own institutions to supply the physicians to keep the system moving. The institutions that we have here are very important for us, both in the short term and in the long term.
Interviewer: Why did you make the decision to stay here?
Dr. Washington: I made the decision to stay when I came to the realization that I could do the most good here. The outpatient center, hospital, and University became home to me, and I needed to contribute to the success of the place that felt like home. The only way to do that was to stay and produce here.
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